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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
CHILD DEVELOPMENT 



The Psychology of 
Child Development 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

JOHN DEWEY 



IRVING KING 

SOMETIME FELLOW IN PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY 

OF CHICAGO. INSTRUCTOR IN PSYCHOLOGY 

AND HISTORY OF EDUCATION IN 

PRATT INSTITUTE 



Chicago 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 

1903 



U3) w^i 






Copyright jgo3 
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



/ 



(>^7 



90 



TO 

F. B. K. 

TO THE INFLUENCE OF WHOSE TRANSITORY LIFE 
THESE PAGES ARE DUE 




PREFACE 

These studies are an outgrowth of work begun 
in a seminar in "Mental Development" conducted 
by Professor Dewey in 1901-2. Their aim is to 
present a consistent and intelligible outline of the 
mental development of the child from the stand- 
point of mental function. They do not pretend 
to try to cover, even in a general way, all the 
aspects of child-psychology, but rather to outline 
a point of view from which it is believed a good 
deal of the chaotic material of child-study will 
assume a new significance. 

Child-study has fallen into disrepute, not be- 
cause it is of slight importance to the educator, 
but because it has been pursued partly in an 
unscientific fashion and partly with the presup- 
positions of an out-of-date psychology, which 
dealt with "powers" rather than the life as a 
whole. These pages emphasize the point that the\ 
attempt to study isolated elements of the child's 
life is radically unscientific; that we must have 
as nearly as possible the complete setting of an 
act before we are entitled to say what it is or what 
it means. 

The first chapters on the early development of 



vi PREFACE 

the child are of fundamental importance. It is 
usually presumed that, if the teacher needs any 
child-psychology at all, it is only that of the years 
covered by the school period. But if experience 
is a continuous affair, she surely cannot hope to 
gain an adequate comprehension of it by studying 
isolated portions of it only. It is particularly 
important that the teacher should see clearly that 
the mental functions can be rightly understood 
only in the broader setting of activity which gives 
rise to them; that the so-called kinds of mental 
activity are differentiations from an originally 
undifferentiated mode of reaction. These points 
cannot be clearly comprehended except through a 
study of the earliest mental development. Hence 
the teacher cannot afford to neglect the study of 
the earliest phases of mental growth. 

We take it for granted that the prime prerequi- 
site for successful teaching is the interpretation of 
the child, the discovery of what the things the 
child feels and does can mean to him with his rel- 
atively undifferentiated experience, not what they 
would mean to an adult with a broader and more 
highly specialized form of life. We grant that 
such a knowledge does not furnish a rule-of- 
thumb guide for the teacher who faces concrete 
situations and problems, but why should it be 
expected to do so? It furnishes a knowledge of 



PREFACE vii 

what she is dealing with, and that should certainly 
be fundamental in all methods of instruction. 

We believe there are two causes for teachers as 
a whole failing to profit by the study of psychol- 
ogy : first, they go to it expecting to get some- 
thing that it cannot give, and hence they fail to 
get what it really can give them ; in the second 
place, they go to the wrong sort of a psychology, 
or rather they have been furnished by educators 
with the wrong sort. They have been compelled 
to study the mechanism of mental contents in 
adult life, rather than the mechanism of mental 
functions developing within complex social situa- 
tions. In other words, the psychology of the 
most value to the teacher is the psychology of the 
unfolding of experience that comes from the 
interaction of mind with mind. 

As we have said, many aspects of child- 
psychology are left untouched in such a prelimi- 
nary statement as this book attempts — aspects 
that are none the less important because they are 
here neglected. Among these are the problems 
of physical growth and the great subject of 
rhythm, so closely allied with the physical organ- 
ism and its method of development; the questions 
regarding disease, mental and physical abnormal- 
ities, and the whole psychology of defectives. All 
these problems, and many others, must be taken 



viii PREFACE 

into account in the complete working out of the 
child's experience. Even the mental functions 
here described have been treated in the barest out- 
line. But scarcely more can be done until we 
have an observational literature built up from a 
more scientific point of view. 

The chapters on "interests" are the most con- 
crete, and at the same time the most unsatisfac- 
tory. They attempt simply to present in systema- 
tized form conclusions and summaries from the 
current literature on the subject. If the informa- 
tion is unreliable, it is believed that the way 
will be cleared for better studies by presenting 
what has thus far been attempted, together Mnth 
the conclusions that may be drawn from the 
data thus collected. We do not mean to imply a 
wholesale condemnation of the studies hitherto 
made of the years covered by the school period. 
There have been a number of careful investiga- 
tors, and their work is undoubtedly of permanent 
value. But this should not conceal the fact that 
there have been extremely hasty studies and 
equally unwarranted conclusions from very insuf- 
ficient data. The type of experience found in the 
school period is, of course, enormously complex, 
and our psychology of these years must long be 
more or less fragmentary and tentative. 

As the references and appended bibliography 



PREFACE ix 

indicate, the material for the chapters on "inter- 
ests" has been found largely in the Pedagogical 
Seminary and in Earl Barnes's Studies in Educa- 
tion. Due credit has been given in every case, 
as far as possible. I owe most of all, both as to 
standpoint and as to actual material on the first 
period of childhood, to some unpublished lectures 
of Professor Dewey's on mental development. 

It is unnecessary to state here that this volume 
owes whatever of value it contains to the stimulat- 
ing influence of the Departments of Philosophy 
and Education in the University of Chicago. It 
claims to be no more than a statement and applica- 
tion of principles familiar to every student who 
has worked with Professor Dewey and his col- 
leagues. I do not mean by this that they are to 
be held responsible for all of the ideas here 
set forth. The responsibility is that which all 
originators of thought are fated to incur — that 
of stimulating others to follow. 

I am indebted to Miss Josephine Henderson, 
professor of composition and rhetoric in the 
Oshkosh Normal School, for valuable assistance 
in the revision of the manuscript for the press. 

Irving King, 



INTRODUCTION 

Mr, King has attempted in the following pages 
to bring out the practical or working value of a 
certain standpoint and method in psychology. 
The attempt is made in connection with the 
mass of material, accumulated in the past genera- 
tion, having to do with the development of the 
human individual between infancy and adoles- 
cence — for we all need to remember that ''the | 
child" is not a distinct genus or species, but is j 
the human being himself in a certain character- 
istic stage of development. That the development 
is more rapid, its necessity more imperative, its 
outward results more obviously striking at this 
period of the life of an individual than at other 
times goes without saying. But I believe there is 
some need for saying what Mr. King has so 
clearly brought out: that the real interest, both 
scientific and educational (or moral), in the 
material of child-study lies precisely in its relation 
to the general question of development — throw->^^ 
ing light upon processes and functions of growth, 
wherever growth is going on, and by contrast 
upon arrest of growth and how that is effected. 
The accumulation of material, the making of 



xii INTRODUCTION 

generalizations, the collecting of statistical aver- 
ages, of stories relating to a particular kind of 
being called "the child," are subordinated to this 
one end. 

There has been much promulgation of the 
gospel of the "genetic," where in truth only the 
material, not the method nor the final interpre- 
tation, is genetic. As Mr. King has shown, 
Preyer, the founder of the scientific psychology 
of childhood, frequently uses pre-existing classi- 
fications of psychology upon which evolutionary 
and genetic ideas (ideas centering in the fact of 
growth) have taken no effect. He employed them 
as Procrustean beds by which to measure the 
meaning of the facts dealt with. The data were 
genetic, but not the method of treating them, nor 
the conclusions finally reached. The same sort of 
thing happens in much that is covered by the 
current term "child-study." Even though the 
familiar classifications and "powers" of the fac- 
ulty-psychology are dropped and despised, we 
may get in their place only discussions of 
isolated "interests" whether individual or statis- 
tically grouped accumulations of incidents and 
anecdotes, descriptions of the more sensational 
and quasi-pathological phenomena of childhood 
and youth. The material is genetic, but because 
it is not considered in relation to problems of 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

groivth, of development, the final effect and value, 
both psychological and pedagogic, are not genetic. 
When the material, but not the method, is 
genetic, we are likely to take the observed fact 
as an isolated thing, complete in itself, needing 
only to be compiled, compared, or averaged with 
other like facts, to entitle it to figure in a gener- 
alization, or, even worse, in a rule for the proper 
treatment of "the child" at such a period — as if, 
it having been shown that 73 per cent, of children 
of a given age take interest in a blood-and-thunder 
story, it were then urged, as a pedagogical pre- 
cept, that there is a presumption in favor of child- 
ren of this age being fed on such stories. The 
illustration is a purely imaginary one, but not 
so the state of things of which it is too accurate 
a symbol. The method, as well as the materiaV^ 
is genetic when the effort is made to see just 
why and how the fact shows itself, what is the 
state out of which it naturally proceeds, what 
the conditions of its manifestation, how it came 
to be there anyway, and what other changes it 
arouses or checks after it comes to be there. 
Knowledge that 73 per cent, of eight-year-old 
boys and girls have a predilection for stories of 
the "nickel-novel" order would not be a fact to 
be despised, but it would be only preliminary to 
the real scientific problem, and the really practical, 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

or educational, conclusion. We should want to 
know the conditions^ the context, social and per- 
sonal, in which the fact showed itself; we 
should want to see it, not as an independent fact, 
but as a fact of developing life, in the history of 
a mind. We should not know how to explain it 
scientifically, to tell what its meaning was, until 
we knew the circumstances which provoked it, 
which called it forth. We should want to know 
how largely these conditions were themselves in 
turn the product of previous conditions, of earlier 
environing influences, of previous modes of 
treating and indulging children. We should want 
to know certain negative or restrictive conditions 
so as to be able to form a judgment as to how 
largely this "interest" is a reaction against cer- 
tain arbitrary and unnecessary limitations which 
children felt, or how largely it is a wild effort 
to compensate for certain unnecessary lacks in 
the surroundings, so that, if these were made 
good, the real psychological interest and attitude 
at the bottom of the fact would seek and find a 
radically different expression. And we should 
hardly be able to know such things until we knew 
something about the other 27 per cent. 

Having placed the fact with reference to its 
generating and stimulating conditions, we might 
be able to pass a scientific judgment upon it. But 



INTRODUCTION xv 

we should not be able to form a practical or edu- 
cational conclusion — that is, a conception of what 
mode of action to base upon the fact as thus 
observed and explained — until we knew some- 
thing about its after-history as well as its prior 
history. We should want to know how it re- 
acted; how it operated as a condition provoking 
further changes, or preventing certain lines of 
growth, and thus tending to arrest retrogression. 
For in a truly genetic method, the idea of genesis 
looks both ways; this fact is itself generated out 
of certain conditions, and in turn tends to gener- | 
ate something else. This latter way of looking \ 
at it — the functional, as Mr. King has stated ' 
and explained it — is necessary to complete the 
genetic, and it is particularly indispensable when 
we try to base any practical conclusions, whether 
moral or instructional, upon the simple psycho- 
logical facts of the case. 

The problem of interpreting children's acts 
is thus a complex and difficult one in any case. 
But it is much simplified if we begin with larger 
and more typical facts, instead of with such 
definite and specialized instances as that of our 
imaginary, yet too true, illustration. Mr. King y 
has well brought out the inadequacy of some of ^ 
the existing material dealing with "interests" of 
children between, say, six or seven and adoles- 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

cence. And the reason, I think, is that the forms 
taken have frequently been so speciaHzed that 
they are products of social and domestic condi- 
tions, of prior modes of education and habitua- 
tion, too complicated to permit of unraveling in 
the present state of inquiry. In such cases we 
get the appearance without the reality of a scien- 
tific result. But this complexity should not dis- 
courage us from attacking cases of greater 
generality; an interest in a game is likely to be a 
result of special circumstances; interests relating 
to a class of games (such as shooting) are more 
general, while the interest in games as such pre- 
sents us with a fact of almost uniform gener- 
ality. We can study, to be sure, only particular 
games, but the more we keep in mind the features 
which give them generic meaning, the more we 
are on the lookout for the conditions that pro- 
voke and satisfy the game-interest as such, the 
more we strive to see what sort of a result 
children get from playing the game, the more 
likely are we to be on a hopeful trail. Certainly 
one of the reasons for emphasizing, as Mr. King 
has done, the importance of a knowledge of the 
psychology of infancy is that here conditions and 
results, by the nature of the case, are less highly 
specialized, less dependent upon local differences 
in the environments and upon previously formed 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

habits, upon ways in which the child has previ- 
ously been dealt with by others — a matter even 
more important than the ways in which he has 
been consciously instructed. 

I come back to my original proposition : the 
true value, scientific and practical, of child-psy- 
chology is not that we may know this or that 
fact about children, or even know this or that 
about the constitution of that plenary being, "the 
child," but that we may know how the growth of 
a human being proceeds, what helps and hinders, 
what furthers and what arrests it, and how these 
results are brought about. When genetic psy- 
chology is conceived in this spirit, the quarrel 
about the practical and moral worth of scientific 
psychology to the parent and teacher will cease 
from lack of material to feed upon — but not till 
then. 

This leads me to say that the genetic-func- 
tional standpoint, as that is expounded and illus- 
trated by Mr. King, also gives a solution for the 
controversy about the relationship of child and of 
adult psychology. We are told that it is only our- 
selves we know ; that it is only ourselves we can 
directly get at; that our knowledge of the mental 
and emotional states of children, even when we 
bring the most sympathetic insight and recollec- 
tion to bear, must after all be based upon our 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

knowledge of ourselves and be a projection out of 
our own conscious lives. And this is true. We 
are also told that in the adult we are dealing with 
complicated results, with habits of perceiving, 
feeling, and thinking, which got formed and set 
and almost automatic in the dim and forgotten 
past, and that we cannot really analyze or inter- 
pret these fixed effects save by reference to child- 
ren in whom we find the causal conditions still 
operating. And this is true. Mr. King has 
sufficiently warned his readers against carrying 
over bodily, as it were, the events and contents 
which characterize the adult consciousness into 
the child's. But the moment we take as our 
problem the matter of growth (or arrest) we 
find that the true psychology of adult experi- 
ence becomes infinitely more available and more 
indispensable for dealing with and interpreting 
what the child does and says than was the old 
rigid classification-psychology. The kind of situ- 
ation that arouses hope, anger, affection, alertness, 
concentration, comparing, fallacious inference in 
the adult is that and only that which arouses it in 
the child. It is only by intimate and thorough 
acquaintance with the conditions that provoke 
such responses in our lives that we can get a vital 
tmderstanding of what goes on in children. It is 
only as we see how our reactions in such matters 



INTRODUCTION xix 

modify our own further behavior, our ways of 
thinking and feehng, how they promote growth or 
tend to arrest us, that we can really judge of in- 
fluences and eflfects in children. To fix attention "- 
upon the genetic- functional aspect is just the way 
to enable us to get the full benefit of our study of 
our own selves, and to make us aware of the 
reciprocal necessity of knowledge of self in 
understanding another — be he child or man — 
and of another in understanding the self. 

What we need, in short, for both scientific and 
educational purposes, is to get rid of externality 
in psychology. Scientific inquirers have largely 
got rid of the externality of the fixed classifica- 
tions and definitions of the faculty-psychology, 
though the latter still hold too firmly in thrall the 
popular mind. But it is quite possible to substi- 
tute an externality of "elements" and com- 
binations" which have a technical but not a real 
existence, since they are cut loose from the vital 
situations in which they originate and func- 
tion, and are thus petrified into things by them- 
selves. Or it is quite possible to get lost in an 
externality of brain centers, nerve-cells and fibers. 
Or again we may leave the externality of rigid 
classifications only to find ourselves in the exter- 
nality of the ways and thoughts of children. We 
cannot have too many experimental facts, nor too 



XX INTRODUCTION 

many physiological facts, nor too many facts of 
child-psychology, any more than we can have too 
much of the reality of logical inquiry and or- 
ganization. But none of these, and no aggrega- 
tion of them, is psychology, either for the scientific 
inquirer or for the educator. They are psy- 
chology only when they are seen and used in 
relation to problems of the changes of conscious 
experience — how they come about and what they 
do. It is the clearness with which Mr. King 
has grasped this idea, and the thoroughness with 
which he has applied it to the material of "child- 
study" that promises to make his book most help- 
ful not only to professed psychologists but to all 
who are interested — and who is not? — in attain- 
ing a better understanding of children. 

John Dewey. 

The University of Chicago. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter I. Child-Psychology, its Validity and Aims. i 
Chapter II. Primary Problems Relating to the Child's 

Earliest Experience i6 

Chapter III. Character of the Earliest Consciousness 28 

Chapter IV. Interpretation of the Emotional Expres- 
sions of Infancy 42 

Chapter V. Summary of Results. Consciousness and 
the Co-ordination of Impulses 71 

Chapter VI. Objects of the Child's World 78 

Chapter VII. First Differentiations of Experience... 84 
Chapter VIII. Differentiation of Mental Functions 

(continued) 99 

Chapter IX. Inhibition no 

Chapter X. Imitation 116 

Chapter XL Moral Ideas of Childhood 132 

Chapter XII. Theory of Interests 154 

Chapter XIII. Development of Interests 172 

Chapter XIV. Concluding Remarks on Interests. 

M ethodology 209 

Chapter XV. Adolescence, an Interpretation 222 

Chapter XVI. Educational Implications 234 

Bibliography of Interests 249 

Charts 256 



CHAPTER I 

CHILD-PSYCHOLOGY, ITS VALIDITY AND AIMS 

The purpose of these studies is to interpret, as 
far as possible, the phenomena of mental develop- 
ment from the point of view of functional psychol- 
ogy. Such a statement v^ill, it is believed, give 
the progressive teacher access to a mass of mate- 
rial regarding child-life that has hitherto been of 
little value because of its lack of organization, 
or perhaps, what is still worse, its organization 
under an antiquated and false psychology. How 
useless the material of child-study has thus far 
been is proved by the fact that it is yet regarded 
as of little importance in the education of the 
teachers of children. It is with the conviction 
that there is a knowledge of child-life that should 
be of the very greatest value to the teacher, that 
this functional point of view is presented. It is 
hoped that it will give us such an understanding 
of the child as not only will make us more sym- 
pathetic in our dealings with him, more apprecia- 
tive of child-life, but also such as will enable us 
to be true artists in the education of boys and girls. 

Psychology, it is generally admitted, is inti- 
mately related to the work of the teacher — so 

I 



2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

intimately, indeed, that every course of study 
designed to prepare for teaching, especially in 
the lower grades, includes some form of psychol- 
ogy, but, in the main, the psychology constructed 
from adult life. The assumption has been that 
whatever is true of the adult mind is true also 
of the child-mind. 

Dominance of adult psychology. — It is not 
merely because the material of child-psychology 
has been chaotic that the teachers of children are 
trained so exclusively in the psychology of the 
adult mind. The practice really dates from a time 
when it was thought that the aim of psychology 
was to describe certain faculties or powers of 
mind, and that therefore the account of any period 
of life would apply equally well to all periods, 
the difference between the child and the mature 
individual being simply in the degree in which 
the various faculties were possessed by each. 
From such a point of view, it was far better to 
study the faculties in their most complete and 
adequate form. To undertake to study them in 
the child would give the student a very imperfect 
comprehension of their nature and worth. If the 
six-year-old had an aesthetic or moral emotion, 
or if he performed a bit of reasoning, it was not 
regarded as different from what might be found 
in an adult, except that there was less of it, or 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 3 

it was simply narrower in its application because 
of the child's limited environment. 

It is clear that on this theory of the mind there 
is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a child- 
psychology. All that psychology has to do is 
to describe certain self-existent powers of percep- 
tion, memory, imagination, reasoning, emotion, 
and will, that are different in children only 
because of the more imperfect degree in which 
they find expression. 

This theory inadequate to interpret child-life. 
— One of the chief dangers in such a point of view 
is that it is apt to shut our eyes to many of the 
facts that should be most vital to us. Whenever 
any mental process is set up to be studied in and 
of itself, we inevitably tend to look at it as the 
reality and to regard whatever obscures the man- 
ifestation of it in the way we think it ought to 
appear, as unworthy of notice and as something 
to be got rid of as quickly as possible. It is in 
just this fashion that the larger part of the 
mental life of the child is discounted. That part 
only is regarded as interesting that conforms to 
the conception of adult mentality, or that at least 
seems to be faintly analogous to it. This attitude 
toward the child-mind is well illustrated by the 
mother that fondly collects and reports her child's 
odd expressions, saying of them that they sound 



4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

so much like those of a grown-up person. There 
is a tacit assumption that it is a good indication 
of future mental ability for the child's expressions 
and attitudes to show early a similarity to adult 
types. To emphasize these analogues to adult 
life is to lay stress on the least important aspects 
of child-life. \The daily, spontaneous outgo of 
energy in play, imagery, and work is of far more 
importance as an indication of the future than are 
the "'cute sayings," which are often mere imita- 
tions — not the sparklings of intelligence that they 
seem to be to the adult, but simply efforts, along 
with many others, that the child puts forth to 
express himself. / As we shall see later, an imita- 
tion is far from meaningless to the child, but it is 
also probably far from having the meaning we 
are apt to put into it. 

This manner of conceiving the child's mental 
life goes back to a type of psychology in which 
not the mental life itself was studied, but certain 
faculties, or powers, in which intelligence was 
supposed to express itself, but which could be 
separated from intelligence. As over against 
this, the more recent point of view is that psychol- 
ogy is concerned, not with the description of 
certain expressions of mind, but rather with how 
mind comes to express itself in certain waySj and 
what the significance is of this or that form of 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 5 

expression in the process of mental activity as a 
whole. Thus it does not start with certain ideal 
forms of activity, and inquire into the degree in 
which they can be traced in the mind's complex 
manifestations, stretching facts as it can to make 
them conform to these type forms and rejecting 
as unworthy of notice what cannot violently be 
forced into its mold. 

This effort to describe, not certain mental con- 
tents, but rather how and for what purpose mental 
life takes on certain forms, or aspects, is what we 
mean by the functional method. We turn now 
to examine it more carefully. 

The functional point of view. — It emphasizes, 
first of all, the intimate interrelation of all forms 
of mental activity, and the impossibility of de- 
scribing any one aspect of consciousness except 
with reference to the organization of conscious- 
ness as a whole. The questions that arise regard- 
ing our mental life are such as these: Why do 
we now remember, now love, now find ourselves 
trembling with fear? Why do we now will to 
do this or that, and what is the relation of these 
forms of activity to the entire life we are living? 
Suppose, for the present, we avoid using the terms 
"remembering," "fearing," "willing," etc. ; for 
they are hopelessly entangled with the older 
attitude. Let us ask simply : How and ivhy has 



6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

this mental state, of which I am now conscious, 
come to be, and what does it mean to me? What 
purpose does it serve in my entire mental make- 
up? If we ask these questions about any man- 
ifestation of consciousness, whether in a developed 
or in an undeveloped mind, whether in an adult or 
in a child^ our interest is clearly in the mental 
state as it exists and zvith reference to its setting. 
It is no longer regarded as an imperfect manifes- 
tation of that which, it is hoped, may mean some- 
thing in a later stage of life. The conscious state 
exists here and now, and it must be interpreted 
entirely with reference to its origin and meaning 
in the here and the now. It is a thankless and 
unilluminating task to describe a case of even 
adult reasoning or feeling as an existence in and 
of itself. When we begin to try to make such a 
description, we find ourselves telling how it came 
to be and what it does. But we can tell hozv it 
came to be only by means of the entire body 
of mental processes that preceded it, and we can 
tell what it does only in terms of the mental pro- 
cesses that follow it. As a matter of fact, when 
psychology has used more than mere words in 
the description of any mental phenomenon, it has 
told how it arose and what it did ; but its empha- 
sis has too often been on the state itself rather 
than on its meaning in the entire mental life. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 7 

If this rather abstract discussion has been 
followed, it can now be seen that this new attitude 
changes the whole aspect of psychology. It 
transforms it into a study first and last of con- 
scious life, not of certain isolated manifestations 
of such a life. We study the various forms of 
mental activity to get at the meaning of this life. 
How does it come to be, and how does it expand ? 
What insight into its significance, as a whole, can 
we get by examining it in its various aspects? 
Psychology from this point of view ceases to be 
a dry-as-dust catalogue of kinds of association, 
emotion, imagination, and reasoning. It is 
rather an inquiry into how and why experience 
becomes imaginative or emotional, and how this 
differentiation serves to promote the movement j 
of the whole experience. 

Relation of the functional point of view to 
child-psychology. — A moment's reflection will 
make it evident that this conception of the aim 
of psychology will radically affect the attitude 
toward the mental life of the child. If it is taken 
as the method of approach to the child-mind, we 
find ourselves no longer trying to unravel dim 
and inadequate manifestations of adult powers. 
The effort is rather to get at the meaning of the "^y 
child-life in terms of itself. Avoiding still the 
stock terms usod to describe mental processes, 



8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

we may say that we examine the various forms 
of the child's activity to get some insight into 
the nature of the child himself. If we can find 
what conditions resulted in his life going out into 
these particular forms of activity, and what they 
mean with reference to the life that produced 
them, we have given the phenomena of the child's 
experience a validity in and of themselves. The 
mental processes of the child are no longer to be 
1 regarded as imperfect affairs. They have all the 
meaning and reality that the mental events of the 
, adult have. True, they may not be at all like 
'the adult events, but they are entirely legitimate 
and valid, because they have arisen within a 
certain type of experience, and they must be 
interpreted in terms of the experience that ren- 
I dered their appearance necessary. Unless we con- 
demn the whole experience, we cannot condemn 
any of the activities that it has called into exist- 
ence. 

The inadequacy of the older method of ap- 
proach is so well expressed by Professor Dewey 
that he may be quoted here : 

Practically many intelligent parents, especially mothers, 
are repelled from the work of infant observation simply be- 
cause there appears to be only a jungle of disconnected 
facts, all on the same level, with no leading points of survey 
or standards of reference; moreover, the individuality of 
the living child is completely concealed in this uncon- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 9 

trolled accumulation of facts with resulting disjointed 
arrangements. The real child who interests, who holds 
attention, who is the object of attention and of education, 
is a living unity. From the concrete and educational stand- 
point, the mass of particular detail is of worth only as it 
can be treated as symptoms, or indices, to the rediscov- 
ery of the living unit of development. One reason, prob- 
ably the chief reason, that the results of child-study up to 
this time have been so comparatively infertile in application 
to education, is precisely because the forest has been lost in 
the trees, and a series of classifications under unreal head- 
ings, like senses, movements, ideas, emotions, have been 
substituted for the concrete individuality. If you take any 
one of the half-dozen mo^e careful biographies of individual 
children and succeed in getting more than a slight idea of 
the character and temperament of the particular child in 
question, you will be more fortunate than I have been. 
Such glimpses as one gets at all are through occasional 
anecdotes and descriptive adjectives incidentally thrown in.* 

Child- psychology different from adult psychol- 
ogy. — If these things are true, how incomplete 
has been the preparation of the teacher who has 
studied only the psychological classifications of 
mature life! Functionally, the psychology of the ) 
child is very different from that of the adult. If/ 
the "mental powers" arise with reference to a cer- 
tain experience, and have certain functions to per- 
form in the furthering of the experience, it is 

VoHN Dewey, "Mental Development in Early Infancy," 
Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child-Study, Vol. IV, 
No. 3. 



lo THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

manifest that an experience differently organized 
from that of the adult cannot be described ade- 
quately by the psychology of adult processes. 

There can be no question but that there is a, 
vast difference between child and man in the 
matter of organization of the mental life. The 
child is not able to react to the complex situations 
in which the man is perfectly at home, because 
his experience is relatively undifferentiated. The 
ordinary responses of our grown-up life are very 
complex. The mental processes called into being 
in the child's efforts to meet certain situations 
will very likely be quite different from those 
aroused in the adult in similar circumstances. 
Perhaps the child makes no response at all, where 
the adult is intensely alive. Take, for example, 
the reaction of each toward a fine sunset. The 
child of four or five years may not respond to it at 
all, or his attention may be attracted in a purely 
sensory fashion by the brilliant colors. How 
different is the reaction of the individual of 
mature mind — what a depth of aesthetic values 
he experiences that are totally foreign to the 
child! 

The point is, then, that there is a psychology 
of the child-mind that is essentially different from 
that of maturity, simply because it is not legiti- 
mate to discuss mental powers and contents in 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT ii 

and of themselves, but only with reference to 
their setting within experience, and further 
because in children we have a different sort of 
an experience from that possessed by the adult. 
It is differently organized because it is new and 
the mind inexperienced. It is different because it 
is confined in its expression and narrow in its 
limits. This is partly dependent on the fact that 
the body, the physical organism, is itself only im- 
perfectly developed and co-ordinated. Moreover, 
the changes in the body due to the processes of 
growth make it such a varying medium of expres- 
sion that the mental processes themselves must 
be quite different from those in an individual of 
relatively unchanging physical organism. 

The child's experience pre-eminently a unity. 
— Although it is, or should be, the aim of all 
psychology to throw light on the process of our 
experience as a whole, it is pecuharly necessary 
in child-psychology. The mere cataloguing of 
mental contents without reference to their mean- 
ing for the conscious life as a whole may be 
tolerable in dealing with the mental life of adults. 
We usually know ourselves well enough to put 
such abstractions into their real setting more or 
less instinctively. For instance, we know so well 
what an emotion of a certain kind means to us 
that we do not detect the emptiness of an attempt 



12 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

to describe it as a content unconnected with the 
rest of our mental processes. But with the child 
such a method is bound to be misleading. For 
when we try to construct his conscious life out of 
such bare abstractions, we are apt to read into it 
the meanings we readily recognize these abstrac- 
tions to have in our grown-up life. We cannot 
insist too strongly upon the fact that mental 
activities arising in children in certain situations 
do not necessarily have the same significance 
to them that the corresponding activities under 
I the s^me external conditions would have to the 
' adult. This, as wc have already said, is because 
a differently organized experience is active in 
each case, and an emotion, a volition, or a pro- 
cess of reasoning simply cannot mean the same 
in the less specialized consciousness of the child 
that it does in that of the adult, where the divi- 
sion of labor mentally has been carried on to a far 
greater extent. 

Summary of the aims of child-psychology. — 
Psychology is in general, then, an examination of 
experience, of how and why the various mental 
functions arise, and the part they play in making 
experience more adequate. The aim of child- 
psychology is the same as this, but with reference 
to an immature organism and a relatively undif- 
ferentiated experience. Consequently the mental 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 13 

events that occur will be different, having a dif- 
ferent sort of an experience for their setting; 
and they will vary constantly as that experience 
becomes gradually more and more differentiated. 

We turn to the phenomena of child-life, not, 
as Tracy maintains,^ to find the adult in minia- 
ture, nor to get a list of the various faculties 
manifested in the child at various ages, but to 
get an account of the way his life, as a zvhole, 
works itself out from year to year; what boys' 
and girls' activities mean to them in terms of 
their own mental endowment, not primarily what 
they are analogous to in the adult. If we can 
thus in some degree get this standpoint, we have 
gone a long way toward putting ourselves in a 
position to afford children intelligent and sympa- 
thetic help. 

Value of such a statement for the teacher. — 
If it is true that the teacher needs to be familiar 
with the science of mental processes, it should be 
evident that her training is not complete until she 
has some familiarity with the mental processes of 
the child. That sort of an experience which it 
is the teacher's mission to enrich, to render more 
adequate to the situations of life, should surely 
be the one with which she should be most familiar. 

Teachers often express themselves as disap- 

^Tracy, Psychology of Childhood [(^Boston, 1893), p. 5. 



14 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

pointed in psychology. But little of the good 
it seemed to promise them did they ever realize. 
It is believed the functional standpoint w^ill be 
much more fruitful for them than has been the 
common one that sought to describe mental con- 
tents as so many things in themselves. Particu- 
larly valuable v\^ill this standpoint be, if it succeeds 
in giving a distinct and suggestive interpretation 
to the facts and processes of the developing mind 
of the child. 

The problem. — Assuming, then, that child- 
psychology has a distinctive sphere of its own, 
we now turn to examine the process of mental 
development itself — the way in which the mental 
functions arise, and the ends they serve. The 
problem is to get some adequate conception of 
the child's experience as such : how he looks at 
things ; what we may legitimately mean when we 
say he is afraid, or is immoral, or is deficient in 
an appreciation of the beautiful, or is imitative; 
what of the sigiiificance of childish reasoning, 
when and with reference to what does it occur; 
how are the mental co-ordinations perfected that 
make possible the complex responses of mature 
years; what is the reason for the shifting of 
interests at different ages ; etc. These and many 
other questions the psychology of the child must 
try to answer. We can attempt to examine only 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 15 

a few of these problems, and that briefly. Our 
purpose is to illustrate a suggestive method of 
approach to the phenomena of child-conscious- 
ness, rather than to work it out in every direction 
exhaustively and in detail. 



CHAPTER II 

PRIMARY PROBLEMS RELATING TO THE CHILD'S 
EARLIEST EXPERIENCE 

The common view. — The method usually fol- 
lowed by investigators of the earliest mental life 
of the child has been to describe successively the 
development of the various senses : the emotions, 
volition, and cognition. They have sought to 
state approximately the day on which such an 
emotion as fear first appeared, or when certain 
movements were first made. The developments of 
grasping, walking, talking, reasoning, etc., have 
all been described in themselves as so many inde- 
pendent processes. As to the attempt to fix the 
first appearance of activity in the various senses, 
when the various emotional attitudes are first 
manifested, when the first evidence of volition 
can be definitely pointed out, the words of Pro- 
fessor Baldwin are much to the point : 

In the first place, we can fix no absolute time in the 
history of the mind at which a certain mental function takes 
its rise. The observations, now quite extensively recorded, 
and sometimes quoted as showing that the first year, or the 
second year, etc., brings such and such developments, tend, 
on the contrary, to show that such divisions do not 
hold in any strict sense. Like any organic growth, the 

i6 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 17 

nervous system may develop faster under more favorable 
conditions, or more slowly under less favorable ; and the 
growth of mental faculty is largely dependent upon such 
organic growth. Only in broad outline and by the widest 
generalization can such epochs be marked off at all.^ 

Some psychologists, while admitting that the 
exact time of appearance of these activities is of 
perhaps minor importance, hold that nevertheless 
the order of appearance is important and that, 
to ascertain the order, the time of appearance 
must be carefully attended to.^ From this also 
we must at least partially dissent, even against 
Professor Baldwin.^ From the point of view we 
have developed, both of these are minor questions. 
If they were important, it would be as impossible 
to say which process came first as to say when 
each first appeared. The whole assumption that 
these questions are of importance, and that some- 
thing can be said about them, involves a radically 
wrong conception of the development of the child. 

First manifestations of mental processes 
entirely undifferentiated. — It certainly may be 
necessary to say of some acts that they involve, 
for instance, a cognitive attitude; of others, that 
they present certain emotional characteristics, 

^J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the 
Race (New York, 1895), p. 10 

^Tkacy, Psychology of Childhood, p. 6. 

^Op. cit., p. II. 



i8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

etc. ; but to say that sensation is present, for 
example, within the uterus,^ or that fear, joy, 
or humor first appears on such and such days, 
presupposes, in the first place, an insight into 
the child's conscious attitudes that we do not 
possess, and, secondly, it assumes just what we 
have been combating most strenuously, namely, 
that the mental functions of the adult exist as 
such in the child, and that the child has much 
the same conscious evaluations of them that the 
adult has. Our point is, then, that these pro- 
cesses cannot be said to appear at such and such 
times, simply because they do not do so. Even 
Professor Baldwin admits that ''the complexity 
becomes finally so remarkable that there seems 
to be no before or after at all in mental things. "^ 
If it is ever allowable, with reference to the adult, 
to speak of this state as an emotion and that as 
a volition — that is, if one is ever separated off 
completely enough to warrant such a description 
— it is unquestionably not permissible as regards 
the child. Here, not only does such a complexity 
soon appear "that there seems to be no before 
and after at all," but even from the first the 
various processes are not marked off clearly from 

^Tracy, op. cit., p. 7 ; Preyer, Physiologic des Embryo, 
p. 484 ; cited by Tracy. 

'Op. cit., p. II. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 19 

one another. The entire child is essentially in 
every reaction, and it is only to the observer that 
he seems now in a state of emotion, now in one 
of cognition, etc. A child in its earlier conscious 
activities may be said to be essentially emotional, 
volitional, and cognitive all at once. Thus, if 
we had all necessary insight into the child's 
states of consciousness — a degree of insight which 
no observer can have — it would still be impossible 
to say of a certain phenomenon : "Here is the 
child's first volition." Nor, as we have stated, 
would it be of much significance to us if we could 
thus accurately name it. The really important 
point is : How does experience differentiate into 
volition and cognition ; under what circumstances 
does the ernotional attitude stand out in its experi- 
ence; and what must such an attitude mean in 
an undeveloped consciousness? In fine, we have 
only to note how very different children are 
as reported in the appearance of their various 
"faculties," to see how much in the air the whole 
thing is and how useless such speculations are. 
To hold that the order of development is impor- 
tant is still to cling to the notion that the child- 
psychologist is to describe certain processes in 
and of themselves, forgetting that they can have 
no meaning except in terms of the entire activity 
within which they occur. 



20 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

The kind of observations needed. — By pre- 
senting this point of view we do not mean to 
be understood as saying that accurate observation 
of infant activity is undesirable or useless; quite 
the contrary. We need even more detailed and 
careful observations of infants than we have 
had, but observations in which every activity is 
reported in its full and complete setting. In fact, 
we want not so much reports of acts as accounts 
of entire experiences, following one on the other 
and embracing all the child's acts with their 
environmental setting, as far as it is possible 
to give it. In other words, we insist simply on 
the legitimate interpretation of the observations 
by taking the observed facts in their complete 
setting, remembering that the fundamental point 
is that each act has arisen as a functional part 
of an entire experience and hence must be stated 
in terms of this experience. 

Real problems of the earliest mental develop- 
ment. — If the primary problem of child-psychol- 
ogy is not to discover the order and exact time 
of the appearance of certain "powers" in the 
infant — which, as a matter of fact, do not exist 
at' all for its consciousness — what shall be his 
starting-point? This we take to be the infant's 
bodily movements. When the infant is first con- 
scious is, and always will be, an extremely hypo- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 21 

thetical question; but of one thing we can be 
sure, namely, that, from the first, the most unde- 
niable characteristic of the baby is its tendency 
to certain activities. To get a good concep- 
tion of the significance of these early move- 
ments, we may classify them according to their 
stimulus, as many have done since Preyer,^ into 
reflex, impulsive, and instinctive. Although we 
may accept for the present this classification as 
a working basis, we should not take it too liter- 
ally. As we shall see, the terms simply describe 
roughly the form of the activity, without express- 
ing any ultimate distinctions of kind. 

Classification of the earliest forms of activity. 
— In a general way, we mean by the reflex activi- 
ties those co-ordinated movements that follow 
immediately some sensory stimulus. Familiar 
illustrations are the contraction of the iris at 
a bright light, sneezing, and crying. All these 
reflexes occur soon, if not immediately, after 
birth.^ Impulsive, or spontaneous, movements, 
as they have been called by many recent psycholo- 
gists, are random movements supposed to be 
initiated from within; that is, not stimulated by 
any external object. Examples are the grosser 
bodily movements, those of the arms and legs, 
etc., seemingly independent of all external stim- 

^Preyer, The Senses and the Will, pp. 196 ff. 
'Preyer, op. cit., chap. x. 



22 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

ulus and possessing little or no co-ordination. 
Instinctive movements are usually supposed to 
be set up by some sort of sense-impressions, but 
differ from the reflexes in involving more complex 
co-ordinations. They are connected especially 
with the food processes and the more complex 
needs of protection from danger. The most 
obvious, and probably the most important, of 
early instincts is, of course, that of sucking. 
Instincts are supposed to be special adaptations 
to ends more remote or complex than those of 
the reflexes, and they differ from the impulsive 
movements in the very fact of their purposiveness. 
On more careful examination we note that all 
these forms of early activity are alike in that 
they are responses to stimuli — a fact of the 
greatest importance in establishing their essential 
unity. The presence of a stimulus is evident 
enough in the reflex form. In the case of instinc- 
tive movements a stimulus seems to be always 
necessary to set them free. The infant does not 
make the sucking movements until the nipple is 
placed between the lips, and any similar object 
can excite the movement. In both instinctive 
and reflex movements there must be stimuli pres- 
ent to condition the activity, and in both cases 
there must be organized adjustments, differing 
only in complexity, for responding to the stimuli. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 23 

In the case of the impulsive movements it is 
entirely likely that there are stimuli originating 
within the organism, if not from without. 
Naturally it is extremely difficult to isolate an 
infant absolutely from all external changes due 
to temperature or pressure of clothing, or to 
avoid slight changes in auditory and visual stimu- 
lation. Thus it may be that many random move- 
ments supposed to be due to internal stimuli 
may really be the result of complicated external 
excitations. It is certain that the nervous dis- 
charge following any stimulus for which there 
is not a definite co-ordination, even in mature 
life, is at first more or less a haphazard affair 
as to the direction it takes, and the movements 
resulting may be so scattered throughout the 
body as to have apparently little connection with 
it. No better illustration can be given than the 
absurd bodily contortions of a child trying to 
control the fingers in the first attempts at writing. 
Thus it is entirely likely that a baby will respond, 
as it were, with its whole body to all stimuli for 
which it does not come into the world with ready- 
made co-ordinations. Only with time will the 
most advantageous sorts of response be selected. 
The point, however, is that even external stimuli 
may be the cause of many of the random, 
impulsive movements in the infant. 



24 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

As to internal stimuli, they may be due to 
many causes. Variations in the blood supply in 
the brain may initiate changes in the yet unstable 
cells; it is also probable that changes in blood 
pressure and supply in various parts of the body 
would have a like effect. When we reflect on 
how many internal changes can be set up in the 
infant's as yet unstable organism — by variations 
in the temperature of the air breathed, by varia- 
tions in the supply and purity of oxygen, by the 
concomitant heart and arterial changes, varia- 
tions in the nutritional elements in the blood, the 
sensations of hunger and thirst, etc. — we must 
see that the number of possible stimuli to such 
impulsive movements of the various muscles of 
the trunk, limbs, and face is very great, so that 
there should be much reserve in attributing any 
of these movements to spontaneous changes in 
the nerve cells themselves. It does not seem 
that they should even be called central in their 
origin, as there are so many possibilities for true 
sensory stimuli both from causes without the 
organism and from those within the digestive 
and circulatory systems. Granted these possi- 
bilities of stimuli, together with an unco-ordinated 
organism, and we have a basis for an almost 
infinite variety of impulsive movements. 

The term "spontaneous" is used by many 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 25 

instead of "impulsive," but we prefer "impulsive" 
because it describes better their true unco- 
ordinated nature and does not carry with it the 
implication that they are movements independent 
of sensory stimulation. 

We thus see that the first movements of the 
child can hardly be differentiated on the side of 
stimulus, excepting that some are due to organic 
and some to extra-organic stimuli. There is, 
however, an important functional distinction that 
can be drawn. It will be noted that we have 
defined both instinctive and reflex movements 
as co-ordinated responses to stimuli, and the im- 
pulsive as unco-ordinated, vague, non-purposive 
movements. In making such a classification 
we depart from the usual notion of reflexes. 
Spencer, for instance, uses the term "reflex" to 
cover both reflex and instinctive movements,* 
holding that there is no difference except in 
complexity. By the usual terminology the term 
"reflex" is used of all responses to extra-organic 
stimuli, and the internally initiated activities are 
called "impulsive," or "spontaneous." We may 
admit the broader use of "reflex" as a mere 
rough and ready term, but in psychology it will 
certainly add to clearness and precision to confine 
it to those simpler co-ordinated movements with 

^Principles of Psychology, Vol. I. 



26 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

which the child is already equipped at birth, and 
to the vast number of co-ordinations that are built 
up and at first consciously performed, but which 
become automatic through habit. It seems very 
inaccurate to call rnere unco-ordinated response 
to external stimuli by the same name that we 
apply to co-ordinations of movements useful to 
the organism. From the functional point of 
view, at least, they are different. Inherited re- 
flexes have definite functions to perform for the 
well-being of the organism. Impulsive move- 
ments are at the first entirely purposeless, but, as 
we shall later attempt to show, they are the raw 
material out of which voluntary, co-ordinated 
movements very soon begin to be formed. 

It is because these purely unco-ordinated im- 
pulsive activities have been loosely called reflexes 
that the notion has become general that the 
higher functional activities, those involving the 
intervention of consciousness, are formed by the 
breaking up of these prjmitive reflexes. But we 
regard both reflex and instinctive movements as 
complex differentiated forms of activity as well 
\ as the so-called higher voluntary acquisitions. 

Both reflex, instinctive, and volitional activities 
are co-ordinate developments from the primitive 
ability of the organism to respond to stimuli, or, 
in other words, from impulsive movements. The 
larger part of the reflexes of the adult are co- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 2'j 

ordinations, once conscious, but gradually handed 
over, as they became perfectly habitual, to the 
entire control of the lower centers. Hence it 
would be more correct to say that the reflexes 
develop from the voluntary movements. At any 
rate, we may safely hold that the development of 
reflexes and voluntary movements is correlative 
rather than successive. Each has a particular 
function to serve, and it is with reference to the 
needs of the organism that activity assumes these 
forms. 

Summary. — The chief characteristic of the 
infant is thus its capacity for activity, roughly 
classifiable into instinctive, reflex, and impulsive. 
We have seen that these distinctions require 
further definition. These movements are all alike 
in being responses to stimuli, and differ chiefly 
in the degree of co-ordination that lies back of 
them. We may take as the primary fact regard- 
ing the newborn infant that it is able to respond 
to stimuli. This includes everything that can 
be said about its activities. From this primary 
basis we are to note how conscious experience 
arises, and how these first direct responses become 
co-ordinated and adjusted to ever wider uses. 
We shall try to state the mental processes that 
arise in the child as functions of the co-ordina- 
tion of these imperfectly adjusted movements 
with which he starts. 



CHAPTER III 

CHARACTER OF THE EARLIEST CONSCIOUSNESS 

Primary problem of the earliest consciousness. 
— We have as yet said nothing about the con- 
sciousness of the infant nor of its self-conscious- 
ness. It is generally held that these are two 
distinct attitudes, that consciousness may exist 
without an accompanying consciousness of the 
self as separate from the objects, activities, and 
persons of the rest of the world. 

It is not necessary here to enter into the vexed 
question as to when consciousness itself first 
appears, or whether it is always present in some 
form or other in all living matter. Some psy- 
chologists have gone so far as to hold that the 
embryonic child has a vague consciousness. We 
can only say if such does exist, it must be purely 
hypothetical. The really important point is not, 
When does consciousness begin F but, What sort 
of a consciousness is it zvhen it has come, and in 
what zvay does it deepen, or become more definite 
and more adequate to the needs of the child? 

An answer to these questions should throw 
much light upon the proper interpretation of 
many activities of early infancy. If we can know 

28 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 29 

the sort of a consciousness we have to deal with, 
we shall be able to interpret intelligently a great 
many so-called expressions of emotion noted in 
very young children; for instance, expressions 
of disgust, pleasure, astonishment, fear. We 
shall also have at least ground on which to say 
what the first ideas or volitions must be like, 
what they must mean in the consciousness of the 
child himself. 

We have pointed out that, aside from a few 
co-ordinated movements, instinctive and reflex, 
the main characteristic of the newborn child is 
its tendency to respond vaguely with its whole 
body to all sorts ot stimulations. The definite 
and useful responses are not yet isolated and 
fixed. From one point of view the infant seems 
to be literally at the mercy of external stimuli. 
On the other hand, the very fact that it does 
respond, and is not simply affected, is an indica- 
tion of an active attitude on the child's part. 
Every expression and posture of the infant point, 
not to a helpless, automatic submission to every 
chance stimulation, but rather to the active put- 
ting forth of effort to get more stimuli. 

TJic earliest consciousness co-ordinate in char- 
acter zvith the earliest activity. — To attempt to 
say definitely what kind of a conscious experience 
that of the newborn babe is, seems to assume a \ 



30 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

knowledge that is impossible. It has already- 
been maintained that we have no warrant for 
asserting the exact date of the appearance of 
certain "powers," or attitudes, even if they do 
appear in serial order. Those who do make such 
assertions, however, would claim that, though 
they do not know the infant's consciousness 
directly, they, at least, can judge of it through 
its various expressions in overt action. This 
position must be carefully distinguished from 
the one presented below. Nothing can be more 
uncertain than to judge of consciousness by its 
so-called expressions. The conclusions must rest 
on the assumption that certain activities are neces- 
sarily connected with certain conscious states — 
an assumption that for any particular case must 
always be more or less hypothetical. In other 
words, we must depend on the mere assumption 
that such and such an act expresses such and such 
a conscious state. 

The situation is, however, quite different if 
we know what is the functional relation of con- 
sciousness to activity. We know, on the one 
hand, that the consciousness of the child changes 
with its* growth, from a relatively vague to a 
highly specialized form. We know also that its 
activities, its possibilities of movement, change 
enormously with maturing years. We can note 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 31 

with certainty in ourselves that our adult con- 
sciousness is intimately connected with the forma- 
tion of new and more complex adjustments for 
action; and that, after the adjustment becomes 
familiar through daily use, it tends to be accom- 
panied by less and less of consciousness. All of 
these things prove beyond doubt that the degree 
of organization present in consciousness bears a 
direct ratio to the degree in which new and com- 
plex adjustments have been formed in the lifetime 
of the individual. The mere presence of a 
complex movement — for instance, a facial expres- 
sion — in a baby only a few weeks old, or the 
infinitely complex adjustments of means to ends, 
as in the ants, is no evidence of a concomitant 
complexity of consciousness. But if we find a 
being, animal or human, which at first did not 
possess complex adjustments to a great variety 
of stimuli, but which in the process of experience 
did acquire them, we can say the consciousness 
of this animal or human being is correspondingly 
developed, although any particular intricate activ- 
ity that we may select may not itself be accom- 
panied by any special consciousness. In other 
words, it is not the mere presence of an act that 
can be taken as an index to the form of conscious- 
ness lying back of it, but the matter of how the act 
arose, how it came to be. Consciousness is related, 



32 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

not to activity, but to the growth of activity. The 
animal or insect coming into the world with 
ready-made complexes of adjustment cannot be 
said to have the same sort of a conscious experi- 
ence that is possessed by a human being, who 
starts with few definite forms of action, but builds 
up many in the course of his life. 

From this point of view we can surely decide 
with some assurance as to the character of the 
child's consciousness. We judge it not by any 
particular act or acts, but by the organization of 
the activity as a whole that it has built up in 
the process of its experience. Turning then to 
the earliest periods of the infant's life, its con- 
sciousness must be entirely co-ordinate with the 
earliest impulsive activities. Its reflex and 
instinctive adjustments, which it has had no 
hand in forming, can mean no more to it, either 
before or after their performance, than do the 
unco-ordinated impulses. If the child is con- 
scious in these first days, it must be with a sort 
of consciousness of which we can form little idea 
— a mere feeling, or sentiency absolutely with- 
out definite reference of any kind. It is so 
hypothetical that it is of little use to speculate 
regarding it. Of one thing, however, we can 
be certain, that is, that definiteness does in time 
appear, and whether it arises out of nothing or 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 33 

out of a previous vague consciousness, we can 
at least note the circumstances of its appearance. 
This is a legitimate and purely functional prob- 
lem, while the question as to the existence of 
previous conscious states unconnected with any- 
process of activity is an enigma. If the infant 
has this vague sentient experience, it is because 
its acts are entirely with reference to stimuli and 
not to things. Just as the response to a stimulus 
impinging on any particular sense-organ is, as 
we have pointed out, at first diffused throughout 
the whole body, so the consciousness of any par- 
ticular stimulus, as such, must be correspondingly 
indefinite. A light stimulus would give, not a 
sensation of sight, but only a vague modification 
of the general tonus of feeling. 

The hypothesis of separate consciousnesses. — 
Some psychologists, as Preyer,^ have supposed 
that there is a sort of a separate consciousness for 
each kind of sensation; for example, one for 
the visual, auditory, and touch sensations, and 
even a pain consciousness separate from all the 
others. Each of these egos is supposed to act 
for itself, and it is only by frequent coincidence 
of unlike sense-impressions that connecting links 
are formed or perfected in the brain. Preyer 
mentions his boy's biting his (the boy's) arm 

^Development of the Intellect, pp. 205 ff. 



34 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

over and over again, in spite of the pain, as an 
evidence of a higher and a lower self, the first 
having its seat in the brain and the latter in the 
lower centers of the cord. It is true there is 
at first imperfect or absolute lack of connection 
between the organs of sense, between the idea- 
tional or upper centers and those of the cord. 
But for this very reason it is not likely that there 
are, as it were, miniature consciousnesses for each 
sense or for the higher and lower centers. The 
lack of connection itself renders definite sensa- 
tions, at least as we know them, scarcely possible. 
The infant does not at first get a lot of some- 
what definite visual sensations, and a lot of 
equally definite tactual and pain sensations, with 
simply the inability to connect them in the sarrje 
consciousness, thus rendering it possible for it 
to bite its arm over and over again because the 
pain-self cannot tell the visual-self that the re- 
sponse to the visual stimulus causes the pain. 
Undoubtedly there is lack of co-ordination 
between the pain and the visual centers. But 
this simply means that the arm as a seen object 
is not connected with the arm as touched or bitten. 
The two sensations, as far as they exist, are in 
the same experience, but without a unitary refer- 
ence. We can think of them as contributing 
only in a general way toward a vague, indefinite 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 35 

consciousness — a consciousness in which neither 
sight, touch, taste, nor hearing exists as we know 
them, but only as the undefined elements of a gen- 
eral consciousness. Out of this undefined con- 
sciousness the special senses arise, or are differ- 
entiated. The point to be emphasized is that there 
must be a unified consciousness from the very first, 
even though it be a vague one. It is not conceiv- 
able that a single consciousness could ever arise if 
w^e had to start with discrete and relatively definite 
elements. It is true the same object may be 
different for the various senses, but the conscious- 
ness is still unitary, if it exists at all. The dis-^ 
creteness lies on the side of the object, not on 
the side of consciousness. 

There is, undoubtedly, a certain independence 
at the first in the development of the various 
sense-organs and sensory centers. 

Physiological research has shown that when the sen- 
sory motor brain centers of touching, seeing, hearing, de- 
velop in the first month, there are no functional cross- 
paths of communication. This corresponds precisely with 
the results of actual observation of the infant activity. 
When the child, who is born practically deaf and blind, 
begins to see, to feel, and to hear, each of these activities 
develops independently of the others ; each is isolated. 
Seeing has no meaning with reference to possible experi- 
ences of touching or hearing. In seeing, the child simply 
learns to follow and fixate light stimuli with the eyes and 



36 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

head; because of lack of cross-reference, meaning, or 
intellectual content, does not attach to the activities.^ 

This is simply another way of saying that each 
sense contributes in a vague way to the general 
consciousness; a definite consciousness of this 
as a sight, that as a sound, can arise only as the 
senses begin to interact, and thus help define the 
meaning, one of another.^ 

The diiferentiation of the special forms of 
sense experience from the primary general con- 
sciousness takes place as a function of the child's 
increasing demands for fuller activity. The 
connections are made possible on the sensory side 
because they have first occurred, or been made 
necessary, on the active side. The infant repeat- 
edly finds the same complexes of sensations con- 
nected with a certain set of activities. The 
activity is a unit, and the group of eye, ear, and 
tactual sensations become inextricably bound up 
with the act, and perhaps come to be symbolic 
of it; the reinstatement of one of the sensations 
serving to call up the images of the others as it 
sets up the activity for which it stands. The 
unity in the reference of the sensations comes in 
on the side of the act. Later, when the object 
is known as an object, the sensations are easily 

^Dewey, "Mental Development in Early Infancy," TranS' 
actions III. Soc. for Child-Study, Vol. IV, p. 71. 
^C/. Calkins, Introduction to Psychology, p. 385. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 37 

transferred to it, or rather, the object seen is 
recognized as the one touched or seen, because it 
has been the basis of the previous single activity. 

Overt action the basis for the co-ordinated 
development of conscious elements. — It is impor- 
tant that we should see that if it were not for the 
connecting activity, there would be absolutely 
no ground on which the senses could be brought 
together in their reference and thus become more 
than mere undefined modifications of the general 
tonus of consciousness. Merely to see an object 
repeatedly and to touch it repeatedly would never 
bring sight and touch together with a common 
reference. It is only as something is to be done 
with the object and the various senses co-operate 
in the doing that their unity of reference appears, 
and only then do they stand out from one another 
as different ways of referring to the same things. 
The child's first objects are really certain possible 
activities that are symbolized by certain sensa- 
tions involved in performing the acts. The sight 
of an apple or of a rattle excites a certain activity 
with reference to it which requires the use of 
hands and mouth, to be completely carried out. 
Thus the growth together gradually occurs. But 
we shall have more to say of this when we come 
to speak of grasping. 

Thus far, then, as regards the first conscious- 



38 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

ness of the infant, while we cannot say when it 
begins to exist, we can safely say of what sort it 
must be after it has come; that is, it must be rela- 
tively as unorganized and lacking in definite 
meaning as are the overt activities that go along 
with it, and that, though the special senses may 
develop to a certain extent in isolation, it is not 
likely there can be any well-defined consciousness 
of the respective sensations, as such, except as they 
become co-ordinated in single activities and are 
made to serve definite functions in the carrying 
out of the activity. Generalizing, we may say 
that consciousness is at first undefined, and that 
it grows in definiteness of reference and content 
as activity becomes more and more complex. 
Development of a consciousness of self. — The 
answer to the above problem is really an explana- 
tion of how self-consciousness arises. Many 
writers have tried to select out certain kinds of 
activity as peculiarly connected with the develop- 
ment of the infant's sense of self. Preyer con- 
nects the development with activities that produce 
painful sensations.^ Miss Calkins- refers it 
partly to the child's experiences with other people 
in the satisfaction of his desires, and partly to 
his native interest in moving bodies, and hence 
in moving people. She says further : 

^Development of the Intellect, p. 189. 

^Introduction to Psychology (New York, 1901), p. 389. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 39 

The development of his imitative activities is doubtless 
a . . . . potent factor in this experience. Originally the 
baby must reflect on these imitations ( !), for example, 
the rhythmic movements of his head and hands, and must 
compare them with their models ; and because his imitative 
movements include motor as well as visual sensations, 
they must therefore contribute to the baby's consciousness 
of his own body, as distinct from other bodies/ 

All this seems far-fetched, as will perhaps 
appear more evident when we take up imitation 
itself. Baldwin^ emphasizes the experience asso- 
ciated with people as over against the child's 
experiences with things. This awakens an inter- 
est m others and helps to intensify his own 
consciousness. Preyer^ mentions the striking of 
the body and other objects, looking into the mir- 
ror, learning language, etc., as important factors. 

From the above opinions it is evident that the 
development of the consciousness of self cannot 
be connected with any one set of activities, and 
it seems more correct to say that all the child's 
activities are factors of very nearly equal impor- 
tance for developing the sense of- self as distinct 
from things and other persons. Miss Calkins 
holds that all consciousness is in a sense self- 
consciousness, 

^Ibid., p. 391. 

'Mental Development, Book I, p. 123. 

^Op. cit., chap. xix. 



40 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

but the undiscriminated, conglomerate consciousness of 
one's own body, resembling, as we have seen, the sleepy 
adult consciousness, is only in a very vague and inarticu- 
late way a self-consciousness, and can only faintly re- 
semble what we know as the consciousness of ourselves.^ 

The first consciousness of the child is probably 
like this sleepy adult consciousness. With such 
a conception it is easier to see how every act of 
the infant tends to bring out and define this 
original vague sense of self. Hence it is naturally 
impossible to say zvhen the child becomes definite- 
ly conscious of himself as related to other selves, 
and as contrasted with things. Self-conscious- 
ness is essentially a relative and variable term 
for all of us. It stands for a process of definition 
that, strictly speaking, proceeds till maturity or 
even later. The really important point is not 
to be able to put the finger down on some one 
thing that proves a developed self-consciousness, 
but to be able to show at every point that the 
process of definition is a function of the growing 
complexity of the child's activities. 

It has been held by many that the child first 
becomes conscious of himself and then ejects this 
sense of self into others; in other words, he is 
supposed to infer consciousness in others from 
his own consciousness. From our standpoint 
this is impossible, nor does the observation of 

^Calkins, op. cit., p. 389. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 41 

children lend any support to the theory. As 
Miss Calkins points out, 

one is never conscious of others except as related to 
oneself, and seldom, if ever, conscious of oneself except 
as connected with other selves. So, whatever the date of 
the emergence of a definite self-consciousness, there can 
be no distinction of time between the consciousness of 
one's self and that of other selves.^ 

Or, putting it more definitely from the functional 
point of view, it would be impossible for a devel- 
oped self-consciousness to arise alone in a series 
of activities that are so intimately bound up with 
other people. 

^Op. cit., p. 392. 



CHAPTER IV 

INTERPRETATION OF EARLY EMOTIONAL EXPRES- 
SION 

The infant consciousness usually conceived in 
emotional terms. — In taking up the various forms 
of the earliest differentiations of consciousness, it 
is most natural to turn first of all to the early 
emotional life of the infant. It is on this side 
that we most often think of the child's first con- 
scious states, and it is important, at the outset, 
to clear it up definitely from the functional point 
of view. If the facts of infantile emotion can be 
so stated, the functional standpoint would seem 
to have stood one of its most crucial tests. 

We ordinarily tend to read our grown-up 
feelings and emotions, even more than our ideas, 
into little children. Their consciousness seems 
to be most easily interpreted as an emotional one. 
Let us see how far this is justifiable, granting the 
infant has the sort of consciousness we have 
attributed to it; or still better, with such a con- 
sciousness, what sort of emotional attitudes is it 
conceivable that it should have ? 

It has been suggested that definiteness of sen- 
sation is functionally related to the growing com- 

42 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 43 

plexity of the child's movements. We have held 
that the same is true of consciousness in general. 
We now inquire as to whether emotional attitudes 
have any such direct connection with the child's 
co-ordinated movements, and, if so, what light 
is thereby thrown on their nature. What do the 
emotions of love, fear, surprise, etc., if they are 
present in the child-consciousness, mean to him? 
True emotion the product of a process of differ- 
entiation. — Of emotion in general it may be said, 
in brief, that it is no more capable of being defined 
in and of itself than is any other mental attitude. 
It is a direct product of previous activity and 
arises in consciousness with reference to present 
action. Every emotion presupposes a definite 
organization and co-ordination of previous activi- 
ties. Its definiteness, its quality, its intensity, 
all depend on the degree of co-ordination that 
has given rise to it. Just as a co-ordinated 
movement of any kind must occur with reference 
to some end that is to be accomplished, so with the 
emotion that arises within such a co-ordination. 
As the co-ordinated movement is thus different 
from an impulsive movement, so is emotion differ- 
ent from the mere sentiency, if such exists, of the 
earliest consciousness. In other words, there is 
no such thing as emotion in general ; it is always 
directed toward something, and it is, hence, 



44 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

impossible to conceive of the diffuse, unorganized 
consciousness of the stage of hfe when impulsive 
movements predominate, as being capable of emo- 
tions in anything like the sense they exist for 
us. Emotion is essentially a "narrowing and 
particularizing experience."^ The possibility of 
emotion grows as the activities become organized 
and the ends capable of being reached become 
more and more remote, and it is not until maturity 
that a genuine basis for the higher and more sub- 
tle emotions exists. Children often simulate the 
presence of these subtler emotions, unintention- 
ally, through imitation of and suggestion from 
their elders. The child thinks that he is expected 
to feel so and so, and tries to find something 
within that may possibly be the attitude desired. 
This, however, will be discussed later, in the 
chapter, "The Moral Ideas of Childhood." Here 
we are concerned merely with aspects of the earli- 
est emotional experience. 

Emotion connected ivith the checking of 
habitual or instinctive co-ordinations. — Many 
modern psychologists hold that emotions arise 
when an habitual activity is checked, especially 
an activity in which there are organized many 
instinctive reactions and adjustments. Now, 
while the child has many instinctive attitudes and 

^Calkins, Introduction to Psychology, pp. 264, 277. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 45 

reactions, he most certainly is relatively free from 
habits, and his instinctive attitudes are not 
organized with reference to any conscious ends. 
Hence they are not as yet available as a basis for 
emotions. Thus, while the checking of the suck- 
ing instinct soon after it is well established might 
produce great uneasiness, and perhaps pain, we 
could hardly say the infant suffered disappoint- 
ment or anger in having the opportunity for 
exercising its instinct removed. But if at the 
end of a year, after the instinct is bound up with 
many conscious experiences of food-getting, and 
many co-ordinated activities connected with it 
have been fixed in habit — if, we repeat, this 
instinct is then denied the possibility of function- 
ing, there is no doubt but that a real emotional 
attitude would arise, varying greatly, of course, 
with the situation which furnished the check. 

In fine, we may say that in proportion as the 
impulsive movements predominate, and as there 
are consequently few habits, the emotions, in the 
stricter sense of the term, will be few and rela- 
tively shallow. There may occur violent reac- 
tions to pleasurable or painful stimuli, but these 
cannot properly be called emotions. Violent fits 
of crying at being thwarted in some conscious 
adjustment — for instance, in the rolling out of 
reach of the ball with which the child is amusing 



46 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

himself, or at the failure to be taken out of doors 
as usual, or at the sight of the mother going out 
at the regular time without him — these are good 
examples of incipient emotions, but it is doubtful 
whether they can be called anything more than 
this. As we shall see later, such a reaction is 
rather the discharging of pent-up energy along 
the easiest motor outlets, of which those connected 
with crying are certainly among the easiest in the 
baby. The activity checked in its overt expression 
simply runs over easily into the muscles producing 
crying, not because there is anything very painful, 
but because it is an easy direction for a discharge 
to take. It is simply a safety valve for the 
arrested overt activity; it is good evidence of 
the intensity of the energy at the child's disposal, 
and nothing more. How little real emotion is 
present in such crying is proved by its extreme 
transiency. 

If the theory of the connection of emotion with 
habit is true, it is clear that emotions, as well as 
ideas and complex co-ordinated activities, are 
the products of growth. They are all impossible 
in the very young child, and only gradually do 
they become possible. We thus see that it is 
impossible to take an isolated act of a baby's and 
say anything definite as to its emotional signifi- 
cance. The meaning of the attitude to the infant 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 47 

itself, what it stands for in its experience, is what 
is wanted, and this cannot be gotten without a 
knowledge of the life-history of the child in 
question. 

How shall the so-called evidences of early 
emotion he interpreted? — We should next take 
up the question of how emotion is related to the 
furthering of the child's activity, or to the deep- 
ening and enriching of his experience, but we 
shall pass over this for the present and turn to a 
more concrete aspect of our problem. If our 
theory regarding the possibility of infantile emo- 
tions is true, how shall we interpret the emotional 
attitudes of very young children as reported by 
many of their closest observers ? Preyer describes 
very minutely children's emotions. Many other 
observers have done likewise, and it is common 
for most of us to be attracted first of all by this 
same aspect of the infant's life, 

Preyer says emphatically : 

Little as is thus far known of the emotions and 
feelings of the young child, one thing may be declared as 
certain — that these are the first of all psychical events to 
appear with definiteness, and that they determine the 
behavior of the child. Before a sure sign of will, of 
memory, judgment, inference, in the proper sense, is 
found, the feelings have expressed themselves in direct 
connection with the first excitations of the nerves of 
sense, and before the sensations belonging to the special 



48 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

departments of sense can be clearly distinguished as 
specifically different. But through repetition of feelings, 
opposed in character, are gradually unfolded memory, 
power of abstraction, judgment, and inference.^ 

It is clear that Preyer, in this passage, uses 
the term "emotion" in a very loose sense. To 
say that feelings and emotions are present with 
definiteness before any other signs of intelligence 
is to assume a knowledge of the consciousness of 
the child that we do not possess. What we 
really have on which to base our theories are 
certain forms of expression, certain reactions. 
What these forms of expression mean for the 
child's consciousness we cannot know directly. 
We can only infer it from what we know in our 
adult consciousness of the functional significance 
of emotion, reasoning, etc. We know how these 
attitudes come into being, how they are related 
to our activity and our consciousness as a whole. 
We have reason to believe that in the child, just 
as with ourselves, consciousness is functionally 
related to the processes of activity, and that the 
so-called conscious attitudes or powers of mind 
are simply differentiations of consciousness with 
reference to the needs of action. If so, we can 
get at their true significance only by interpreting 
them with reference to the needs that called them 

^The Senses and the Will, pp. 185 ff. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 49 

forth, and in terms of the organization of activi- 
ties in which the necessity for them arose. 

In the child's vague consciousness, as we have 
already seen, not only are there not definite 
emotional attitudes, but the emotional attitude 
as such can hardly be said to have differentiated 
itself from those of cognition and volition. We 
have at first simply an undifferentiated conscious- 
ness accompanying a lot of impulsive activities, 
the first simple steps in the co-ordination of 
which are mediated by a consciousness that can- 
not be said to be volitional, ideational, or emo- 
tional. It is only, as we have said repeatedly, 
when the adjustments to be made become com- 
plex, that a division of mental labor begins to take 
place. The mental attitudes of all mature minds 
are strictly co-ordinate with the complexity of 
activity of which they are capable. The presence 
of a distinct idea in anyone's mind means the 
possibility of a particular sort of complex activity. 
The presence of a distinctly emotional attitude 
means that a complex co-ordination of instinctive 
and habitual activities has been checked, and that 
they are held in suspense or are being made over, 
or readjusted to another and perhaps more 
complex situation. But in the infant, with its 
unco-ordinated impulses, we can expect only a 
correspondingly indefinite demarkation of mental 



50 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

functions, not to speak of the indefinite demarka- 
tion of different aspects of one particular function. 

Now, a careful examination of the emotions 
attributed to very young children reveals the 
fact that they are really more intelligible and con- 
sistent taken in this way than if interpreted as 
similar to the developed and consciously evaluated 
emotional states of the adult. 

Nature and origin of the forms of emotional 
expression. — The accounts of these so-called early 
emotions are, as stated above, based on certain 
supposedly emotional expressions noted in the 
infant's behavior. Prej^er, for instance, notes 
the expression of satiety, of discomfort, etc., very 
soon after birth. Crying is taken as a sign of 
strong dissatisfaction or of fear. Various other 
signs also of fear are noted, as well as those of 
astonishment, surprise, etc. Before examining 
the evidence before us, we may pause to inquire 
into the nature of the forms of expression usually 
given an emotional significance. Opening wide 
the eyes is mentioned as one of the earliest expres- 
sions of pleasure.^ Crying has just been noted 
as an expression of pain and discomfort, as is 
also shutting of the eyes, turning away of the 
head, etc. The mouth is noted as "a most deli- 
cate index of the child's mood," whether agree- 

^Preyer, op. cit., p. 143. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 51 

able or disagreeable, as early as the third month.^ 
Laughter is noted in the second month. 

These fairly regular forms of expression that 
seem pretty constantly to accompany certain sorts 
of experiences — e. g., cold draughts, warm baths, 
full stomach, sight of cats and other strange 
objects — are clearly definitely co-ordinated move- 
ments. Their constancy of form and their 
seemingly definite relation to certain experiences 
preclude the possibility of their being mere im- 
pulses. They are without doubt, as Darwin 
showed,^ instinctive adjustments, the remnants 
of certain complex activities, useful at some previ- 
ous period in maintaining the life-processes of the 
individual, but now reduced to mere forms of 
expression. Now, the important point here is 
that these instinctive complexes, because they 
are instinctive, are, at their first appearance in 
the infant, purely automatic affairs and do not 
stand for any conscious evaluations, as they do 
in the adult. There is no doubt but that they 
may, and do, represent feelings of comfort and 
discomfort in the child, but we shall find them 
also occurring where there can scarcely be any 
definite feeling-tone to his consciousness. 

In so far as they are instinctive, they must be 

^Op. cit., p. 148. 

^Expression of Emotion in Men and Animals. 



52 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

unconnected with conscious attitudes. — It is often 
thoughtlessly assumed, if the ability to make 
certain movements is inherited, that the conscious- 
ness, of which the movements v^ere originally the 
expression, may also be transmitted from genera- 
tion to generation. To explain fully here why 
the capacity for certain movements may be inher- 
ited, while consciousness is not, would be too 
difficult a task. It will be sufficient for the pres- 
ent to recur to the conception of consciousness 
as arising with reference to the working out of 
some complex adjustments of action. The ability 
to make certain movements may be inherited; 
that is, the proper co-ordinations in the nerve 
centers are wrought out before birth. But if our 
conception of consciousness is correct, the latter 
could come into existence only in the actual pro- 
cess of activity, through the necessity of readjust- 
ments and adaptations. We can conceive of an 
individual's having inherited a predisposition to 
have a certain sort of conscious life, but the 
conscious life, as an actual existence, he must 
construct for himself. It does not come to him 
ready-made, along with the motor co-ordinations 
with which he is born, but only with the motor 
co-ordinations that he himself builds up. 

The point, then, thus far is this : The expres- 
sions usually supposed to indicate emotion in very 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 53 

young children, especially in the first two or three 
months after birth, must in and of themselves 
be regarded as co-ordinations of the purely 
instinctive type, to which there is little more than 
a very vague conscious value. Their number is 
comparatively small at first, limited to the open- 
ing and shutting of the eyes, the slight play of 
facial muscles, and crying. These expressions, 
as we have noted, all appear along with certain 
fundamental bodily conditions — the satisfaction 
of hunger, certain tastes, etc. Stimuli of a 
simple character, having no immediate relation to 
these vital needs, apparently excite no expression 
of feeling or emotion in the baby, even though 
to the adult they arouse intense affective tones. 

All of these facts point to the position we have 
from the first held — that the earliest so-called 
emotions are purely organic. Their expressions 
are simply the instinctive adjustments toward 
certain vital stimulations; while other stimuli 
that lie a little outside the baby's most pressing 
needs are not reacted to at all in this apparently 
emotional fashion; that is, they do not call out 
the instinctive adjustments. This does not mean 
that these stimuli have no effect on the baby's 
organism, but that the effects are not so notice- 
able, since they are not as yet associated with 
ready-made co-ordinations suited to receive or 
reject them. 



54 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

As this expression is organized into larger 
wholes of activity, the child gradually becomes 
conscious of its peculiar feeling, and this feeling 
stands to him for the emotional value, or worth, 
of the situation toward which the instinctive re- 
sponse is made. But this can hardly be so when 
the expression first occurs. As a muscular move- 
ment, it of course has a certain feeling connected 
with it, which we may call "the feel" of the 
adjustment. However, since the movement has 
occurred entirely automatically, it is clear that 
the feeling of the movement cannot in any wise 
be connected with the situation that has called it 
forth. Thus it seems altogether impossible that 
the expressions of the newborn infant, however 
violent, can have any emotional significance. H 
they are connected with feelings, they are simply 
the feelings of making certain physical move- 
ments, the meaning of which is absolutely blank 
to the baby. 

First expressions connected with food-getting. 
— In this way, then, may be interpreted the ex- 
pressions, occurring in the first few months of 
the child's life, which are described by Preyer 
and many others, and which are familiar to every- 
one that has given any attention to very young 
children — expressions such as those following 
the appeasing of hunger, the warm bath, expres- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 55 

sions of pleasure at being undressed, at various 
sounds, at the sight of the human face, of deHght 
at being taken into the fresh air, and of dis- 
comfort at conditions the reverse of the above. 
All these expressions, we may repeat, occur as 
parts of activities that lie very close to the vital 
needs of the baby. How purely instinctive they 
are is evident from the fact that certain- other pow- 
erful stimuli that unquestionably affect the child — 
e. g., repulsive and foul odors — produce, at the 
first, no signs of nausea ; no expression of the face 
is associated with the reception of such impres- 
sions. As stated above, the explanation of this 
fact on the functional theory is that they lie com- 
pletely outside the immediate requirements of the 
life-process and appear only later as required ad- 
justments in a broadened experience. If the sim- 
ple play of facial expression were the indication 
of a very conscious pleasure or pain, it is not con- 
ceivable why the disgusting odor should not 
produce the proper facial expression, just as does 
the bad taste in the mouth. There is no question 
but that both are received as sensations, and that 
both contribute to the general tone of conscious- 
ness, tending to render it agreeable or disagree- 
able. Our point is that in neither case is there 
any localization of this vague tonus in a definite 
feeling, although in the one case a developed 
expression results, while in the other none at all. 



56 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

Interpretation of expressions of fear. — The 
early cases of supposed fear may be explained 
in the same way. The appearance of fright 
seems to follow so little regularity, or system, 
that it is hard to believe the infant has a definite 
instinct to be afraid of certain objects. If this 
were the case, all children would in the main be 
afraid of the same things. More probably the 
main element in such cases is the sudden and 
unwonted stimulus which produces necessarily a 
large and general reaction. This reaction would 
tend to occur through the motor channels offering 
the least resistance; that is, through the ones 
traveled oftenest; or, we may say perhaps, a 
violent reaction, such as crying, furnishes a safety 
valve, in many cases, for the pent-up energy 
which at other times may result in expressions of 
joy and laughter from almost identical stimuli. 

Preyer tells us^ that ''the time at which a 
child first betrays fear depends essentially upon 
his treatment ;" that "the avoidance of occasions 
of pain prolongs the period that is marked by 
unconsciousness of fear; whereas the multiplica- 
tion of such occasions shortens the period." In 
regard to this we should say that there is no 
intrinsic reason why the mere suffering from pain 
should make the baby more easily susceptible to 
the emotion of fright, as in the presence of cer- 

^The Senses and the Will, p. 164. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 57 

tain animals. What probably does occur, as a 
matter of fact, is that the frequent occurrence of 
painful sensations has increased the child's sensi- 
tivity to stimuli in general or created in the ner- 
vous system a state of unstable equilibrium. In 
such a child a violent or unwonted stimulus would 
tend to produce a reaction through instinctive 
channels more easily than in one whose pain 
threshhold was relatively higher. 

All observers of children have noted how they 
are usually thrown into fright at sight of dogs, 
pigs, cats, etc., before any experience with these 
animals can have taught them that they possess 
any dangerous qualities. Preyer tells us : 

A little girl was afraid of cats as early as her four- 
teenth week of life. Thunder makes many children cry — 
for what reason? .... If there is in this case the co- 
operation of ideas, either clear or obscure, of danger, or 
of reminiscences of pain after a noisy fall, or of disagree- 
able sensations at loud rumbling and the like (I observed 
that my child in his second year cried with fear almost 
every time heavy furniture was pushed about), yet in the 
expressions of fear on the part of unexperienced animals, 

factors of this sort are excluded [The child] is 

afraid of all sorts of things not at all dangerous, before he 
knows danger of himself and before he can be infected 
by the timidity of mother or nurse. It is altogether wrong 
to maintain that a child has no fear unless it has been 
taught him. The courage or the fear of the mother has, 
indeed, extraordinary influence on the child, to the extent 
that courageous mothers certainly have courageous chil- 



58 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

dren, and timid mothers have timid children, through imita- 
tion; but there are so many cases of timidity and of 
courage in the child, without any occasion of that sort, 
that we must take into account .... an element lying 
farther back, heredity. Thus Champneys observed that his 
boy, when about nine months old, showed signs of fear for 
the first time, becoming attentive to any unusual noise in 
a distant part of the room, opening his eyes very wide and 
beginning to cry. A month or so later this child had a toy 
given him, which squeaked when it was squeezed. The 
child at once screamed, and screamed afterward again and 
again when it was offered to him. But after some time he 
became accustomed to the squeaking, then he was pleased 
with it, and would himself make the toy squeak.^ 

Preyer gives many other examples, and every 
reader that has observed a baby can supply many 
more. In by far the majority of cases we can- 
not conceive of the apparent fright as being due 
either to education or (Preyer to the contrary) 
heredity. This latter possibility is excluded, 
because wt have repeated instances of children's 
fright at objects which never could have played 
any part in the danger experiences of the child's 
ancestors, and hence fear of them could hardly 
have become hereditary. 

We have quoted the passage from Preyer 
because it illustrates so clearly the difficulty 
involved in assuming a definite emotion of fear 
present in these expressions of the child. As we 

^Op. cit., pp. 164-67 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 59 

have already pointed out, the child has inherited 
a small number of motor co-ordinations, of an 
instinctive type, and in these the tensions resulting 
from any unwonted or strong stimulus are apt 
to find easiest relief. Some of these co-ordina- 
tions in the adult are expressions of grief, fear, 
etc. ; others of joy. Now, if a stimulus calcu- 
lated to produce a strong reaction, and yet one 
toward which we can conceive the child to have 
no inherited fear, is brought to bear upon him, 
it is really a matter of indifference in what way 
the reaction occurs. It may be diffused in many 
impulsive movements, or it may drain off in 
certain inherited co-ordinations, and the particu- 
lar channel it takes will be determined largely 
by the use that channel has previously had. The 
crying co-ordination is one that comes into use 
at birth, and continues to be constantly ready to 
be touched off. It is absurd to attribute to crying 
in the earlier periods of infancy much emotional 
significance. It is, as heretofore suggested, 
rather a safety valve through which the energy 
of response to a great variety of stimuli, having 
little or no connection with its instincts, may find 
outlet. 

Capriciousness of the infant's expressions of 
fear. — If there is any evidence that the same, or 
practically the same, stimuli have on different 



6o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

occasions precisely opposite effects on the child, 
the contention above would have much weight. 
Fortunately there is such evidence. We take the 
following from Preyer : 

In the sixteenth month my child was afraid when I 
drew tones of high pitch from a drinking glass by rubbing 
with my finger, as I had done once at an earlier period. 
His fear, which did not at that time — in the third month — 
appear, now increased to the point of shedding tears, 
whereas the ring of the glasses when struck was greeted 
with a cry of joy. Did the unusual tone at the sixteenth 
month seem uncanny (!) on account of ignorance of 
the cause? Yet the same child laughed at thunder and 
lightning (eighteenth and nineteenth months) ; another 
child even in the thirty-fifth month did the same, and 
imitated cleverly with the hand the zigzag movement of 
the lightning. In the twenty-second month my child 
showed every sign of fear when his nurse carried him 
on her arm close by the sea .... even during a calm 
and at ebb tide when there was but slight dashing of the 
waves. Whence the fear of the sea, which the child is 
not acquainted with? The water of the Eider Canal, 
of the Saale, of the Rhine, he was not in the least afraid 
of the same year. The greatness of the sea could not 
itself excite fear, for the symptoms of dread were shown 
only close by the water. Was it, then, the roaring heard 
in advance?^ 

Both this quotation and the preceding one 
from Preyer illustrate well the confusion and 
difficulty resulting from the attempt to explain 
the child's expressions of feeling in and of them- 

"■Op. cit., p. 169. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 6i 

selves. It is absolutely impossible to say what 
the emotional value of any of these expressions 
is, because we know nothing of accompanying 
conditions. The seemingly capricious character 
of the emotions last described Preyer is unable 
to explain, but from our theory as to the gen- 
eral character of the infantile consciousness this 
very caprice is what we might expect, as we 
have already pointed out. The inherited co- 
ordinations both of fear and joy form easy 
channels of discharge for any stimulus, and it 
is generally a matter of uncertainty which path 
the discharge may take. A strange stimulus usu- 
ally produces crying, because this is a commonly 
used co-ordination; but, as we see in the cases 
cited from Preyer, it is entirely possible for the 
discharge to take place in the co-ordination 
expressive of joy. Thus again the fact is empha- 
sized that much that passes on the surface for 
childish feeling has very little conscious signifi- 
cance; that is to say, when the child cried at 
the rubbing of the glass, he might, if we may 
suppose for a moment that he was capable of 
such introspection, have asked himself: ''What 
in the world am I crying for?" 

However, we must not place too much reliance 
on these instances, even if they seem to play into 
our hands. Being isolated cases, it is possible 



62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

for scores of factors unknown to us to have made 
the results what they were. We repeat from a 
previous page that the whole life-history of a 
child must be known before we can state dogmati- 
cally what a given overt act or conscious attitude 
must mean to it, and not only must the remote 
antecedents be known, but particularly the imme- 
diate setting of the act and the physical condition 
at the time. All of these conditions present pos- 
sibilities for almost indefinite modifications and 
variations in the meaning of such a state of con- 
sciousness. 

Evidence for our theory from adult experience. 
— It is, however, true that the expressions of the 
various emotions, even in adults, are closely 
related. This is especially true of grief and joy. 
Many instances could be collected to illustrate 
how frequently exactly the opposite of the 
appropriate expression of emotion occurs. For 
instance, the death of a friend was once suddenly 
announced to a company of young people who 
had been quietly talking. They burst at once 
into violent laughter, much to their chagrin 
afterwards. A youth throughout his adolescent 
period found it difficult to keep from crying when 
talking with anyone, such as his teacher, whom he 
felt to be his intellectual superior. The slight 
nervousness aroused by such conversation, not 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 63 

finding a ready outlet in easy vocal expression, 
flowed easily into the co-ordination of crying, 
though there was really no feeling in any wise 
akin to tears. He was always greatly mortified 
that his mental excitement had to take this form. 
As it became easier for him to express himself, 
a new outlet was furnished for his feeling, and 
the tendency to cry gradually left him. 

We have ventured to make this digression 
because, if it is true that in the relatively mature 
mind there is a possibility of little control over 
the pathways of nervous discharge, so that an 
unemotional fund of energy may assume an emo- 
tional expression; and if, further, real sorrow 
may find outlet in forms ordinarily the expression 
of joy, it is certainly ^not unlikely that the seem- 
ingly unaccountable and inconsistent expressions 
of emotion in the infant, provided they are cor- 
rectly reported, have little emotional significance. 
It is at least entirely possible for them to be mere 
mechanical responses to stimuli — responses that 
have no meaning one way or another to the child, 
or at least an undifferentiated meaning. As age 
advances, however, and objects begin to have a 
definite meaning through the doing of many 
things with them, or the seeing of them at many 
different times, they can begin to have a basis 
for real emotional values, and the child's reactions 
1-0 ward them will have real emotional significance. 



64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

The so-called astonishment of infants. — We 
have thus far confined ourselves to expressions 
of fear or dissatisfaction and the opposite. Other 
forms of early emotion, however, may be inter- 
preted in the same way. Astonishment, for ex- 
ample, is regarded by Preyer as a very early 
emotion, and one of fundamental importance in 
the development of mental power. He mentions 
the following case : 

When the child was in a railway carriage, and I 
suddenly entered, after a brief separation, so that at the 
same moment he saw my face and heard my voice, he 
fixed his gaze upon me for more than a minute, with 
open mouth (the lower jaw dropped), with wide-open, 
motionless eyes, and in other respects absolutely immov- 
able, exhibiting the typical image of astonishment.^ 

Several other instances might be given from 
Preyer and others. In general, the expression 
is one of open eyes and dropped jaw. Here, 
instead of a definite feeling of astonishment, it 
is more probable that we have before us something 
like this: A comparatively complex situation is 
presented — the father suddenly entering the rail- 
way carriage and speaking the moment he is seen. 
The situation is not one containing any violent 
stimuli, such as would arouse an instinctive reac- 
tion in the form of fear. The situation does offer 
the possibility of several sorts of mild reaction, 

^Op. cit., p. 173. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 65 

and the stimuli to them, being presented all at 
once, are all checked and the child, as it were, 
hangs relaxed; the appropriate reaction does not 
come. Of course, this is what astonishment 
really represents in the adult consciousness, but 
the advantage of our stating it in this way for 
the infant makes it clearer how here, as in the case 
of expressions of fear, there is not necessarily any 
indication of a true emotion. Preyer notes that 
these symptoms of astonishment gradually became 
less and less frequent, and assigns as the reason 
that the child had been astonished so many times 
that he had gradually become used to new 
impressions.^ It is dreadful to contemplate the 
possibility of such infantile ennui in the face of 
the strange, beautiful world it has scarcely as 
yet entered. Preyer's so-called early astonish- 
ment ceases because the child gradually attains 
the ability to react in many new ways, and in 
the presence of many new impressions he is no 
longer at a loss, as at first, for the proper reaction. 
Another early emotion mentioned is sympathy; 
and here, as before, it is very doubtful if we are 
not carrying over a highly complex attitude of 
adult experience to explain some very simple reac- 
tion in child-life. Preyer tells us" how at two and 
a quarter years, in looking at some little pigs, his 

^Op. cit., p. 174. Ubid., p. 168. 



66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

boy screamed and turned away in fright when 
he saw them begin to suck at the teats of their 
mother, who lay in the sty perfectly quiet. It 
appeared later that he thought they were biting 
their mother. Here we probably have the begin- 
nings of a genuine emotion of fear. The sucking 
of the pigs could easily suggest to a child of that 
age the idea of biting, which sets up or mediates 
a reaction resulting in fear. That is to say, the 
vivid idea of biting was set in a certain emotional 
complex of previous experiences, and this is 
stirred up the moment the idea is suggested. 
Although Preyer does not cite this as an example 
of sympathy, it is just such an instance as is often 
brought forth to prove the presence of strong 
sympathetic natures in young children. Here 
the child does not cry because he feels sorry for 
the old sow, but because he becomes vividly con- 
scious of the significance to himself of an experi- 
ence of being bitten. Here, again, the reader will 
say, this is exactly what sympathy is in our adult 
experience, but we will note it is, in the child, 
probably entirely lacking in the objective refer- 
ence which is such an essential element in all real 
sympathy. 

Baldwin reports^ as instances of the early 
development of sympathy that his child cried 

^Mental Development in Child and Race, p. 333. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 6y 

in her fifth month when he pinched a bottle 
cork (!), "and wept in her twenty-second week 
at the sight of a picture of a man sitting weeping 
with bowed head in his hands and his feet held 
fast in stocks." So preposterous are these inter- 
pretations that they are hardly worth mentioning, 
were it not that they have Professor Baldwin as 
their authority. In the first place, we must not 
hastily conclude that a child's reaction is the 
result of a given stimulus. In the present cases it 
is more than likely that the tears were not caused 
by what was supposed to have caused them. The 
physical stimulus, moreover, in these cases might 
be identical for baby and adult, and yet a sympa- 
thetic reaction implies a reaction, not to the mere 
physical stimulus, but to an image that that stim- 
ulus arouses, that is, to a remote meaning of the 
stimulus. Now, the question is : Could the baby 
have reacted to the meaning, or possibly only to 
some direct aspect of the presented situation that 
appealed to the child's unorganized experience? 
It is incredible, if our previous statements regard- 
ing the nature of the early emotional life are true, 
that the processes necessary to produce even the 
rudiments of such a state of feeling are present. 
Thus the reaction, whatever it was, must have 
been to elements totally different from those that 
to the adult would have meant sympathy. That 



68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

is, certain elements having no reference to the 
emotional value of the picture or of the pinching, 
from the adult's point of view, may have set free 
the child's reactions. Even adults, who think 
they are getting the emotional value of a work of 
art, are often excited by something quite sub- 
sidiary, and perhaps quite extrinsic to the real 
aesthetic impression meant to be conveyed. If we 
may thus be totally mistaken in our judgment as 
to the sort of thing that is attracting a mature 
mind in a certain picture, how much less certain 
must we be of the sort of reactions we observe 
in children and what they really mean in their 
consciousness ! 

The uncontrolled character of the earliest 
feelings. — We have noted that certain stimuli 
tend to produce violent instinctive reactions. All 
the energy of the child drains off into compara- 
tively narrow channels. As co-ordinated activity 
is gradually built up, there is less likelihood of 
such violent reactions. The first emotions tend 
to be of just this character. When the little 
child does begin to react to the meaning of a 
situation — that is, to have an emotional attitude 
— he is often paroxysmal because of the very 
uncontrolled manner of the reaction. There are 
not enough organized attitudes to check up intense 
feeling and ca-rry it off into other directions. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 69 

Hence in all children the expression of feeling 
is usually far freer than in the adult. The emo- 
tions gradually evolve from comparative parox- 
ysms to the regulated reactions of an intelligent 
conscious self to the meanings of certain complex 
situations. 

Conclusion. — The excuse for this lengthy dis- 
cussion of the child's emotional attitudes lies in 
the fact that they afford a crucial test for the 
theory of his consciousness presented above. In 
no other aspect of the mental life have people been 
more prone to read their own standpoint into 
the child. It is maintained, in conclusion, that 
emotional attitudes are as much differentiated 
products as any other mental function, and that 
it is impossible to postulate their presence before 
there have been built up consciously co-ordinated 
sets of activity with reference to definite things 
and persons. We do not attempt to find the first 
appearance of emotion. The really important 
question is to discover the kind of a process, or 
situation, that tends to call for the division of 
labor that the emotional attitude represents. By 
starting with such a question we avoid precon- 
ceptions, and hence misinterpretations, that inva- 
riably result from carrying over the conceptions 
that have originated in one sort of experience 
and trying to apply them in another of different 
organization. 



70 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

The true method is to take the experience and 
note what sort of activity it stands for; how it 
differentiates and grows in complexity as the 
demands made upon it increase. We are thus 
able to define the mental functions that arise in 
terms of the experience we are studying, and not 
in terms of some more mature one. We are not 
concerned with finding in the child analogues 
of adult events, but in defining the actual divi- 
sions of labor that occur in terms of their meaning 
and significance in the experience in which they 
occur. For instance, it is not nearly so important 
to label this or that as a case of fear or of volition, 
as to state its relation to the experience that called 
it forth. This alone can reveal its true nature. 

If the discussion thus far has been destructive 
rather than otherwise, we have at least cleared 
away preconceived ideas of child-life and opened 
the way for a constructive statement. 



CHAPTER V 

SUMMARY OF RESULTS. CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE 
CO-ORDINATION OF IMPULSES 

General summary of results. — Thus far the 
effort has been to get a good working conception 
of the nature of the infant's earhest mental Hfe. 
No doubt many important points have been omit- 
ted, but at least a method of approach has been 
outlined that can best be elaborated by each 
student for himself. 

The upshot of the inquiry thus far is this : 
The newly born infant is at least able to make 
certain movements. Whether it is conscious or 
not is purely hypothetical. We know at least 
that it moves, and that these movements are 
responses to stimuli of various kinds. Most of 
its movements are unco-ordinated. There are, 
however, simple reflexes, and we have chosen to 
confine the term to those movements which are 
the result of simple inherited co-ordinations of 
muscles and neural tracts. There are also a few 
more complicated co-ordinated movements, such 
as sucking and grasping, that may be called 
instinctive. It was noted that all three sorts of 
movements were alike in being responses to some 
sort of stimuli. The latter two varieties were 

71 



"72 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

found to differ chiefly in the complexity of the 
response involved. It was stated that the neural 
connections on the whole are only imperfectly 
worked out in the babe, so that every stimulus is 
apt to arouse a diffused response. The excita- 
tion flows out in a haphazard way over the whole 
body, or at least in apparently useless directions, 
except where there is an inherited reflexive or 
instinctive co-ordination, in which case the 
response is more or less definite. 

Consciousness and movement. — We can judge 
of the consciousness of the child only from what 
we know of the characteristics of consciousness 
in general. We know that it is most intense in 
the midst of obstacles, when new lines of action 
must be sought out and adjusted to meet the dif- 
ficulties. As long as our activity goes on without 
break, reflexly or habitually, we are not at all, 
or only vaguely, conscious of it. It is only as the 
reflex, or habitual, activity proves insufficient to 
meet the situations we are in that we become con- 
scious of it and begin actively to examine our 
conditions to find out how to readjust our activity 
so that we can proceed. It seems from this that 
we may safely say that our moments of intense 
consciousness are strictly functional, arising in 
the reorganization of activity for new ends; and 
it is likely that a careful analysis would show that 
all our conscious life could be so defined. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 73 

With reference to the infant, if we could define 
its consciousness only as consisting in certain 
contents, certain emotions or ideas, as involving 
the recognition of other persons, things, etc., it 
would be guesswork to say what its character is. 
If, however, it is possible, as has been done above, 
to define it with reference to the part it plays in 
activity, we can turn to the child's active manifes- 
tations and tell with some certainty what sort of 
a consciousness must be a function of such 
activity. 

Impulses the basis for the development of 
consciousness. — As was stated above, the reflex 
and habitual activities of adult life are accom- 
panied by little or no consciousness. We are 
undoubtedly conscious when we are performing 
habitual acts, but chiefly with reference to some 
other activity or with reference to the end in 
view, and not as to the habitual movements them- 
selves. If we turn now to the child, we find no 
acquired habits, as with the adult, but instincts. 
Its reflexes are like the adult's but fewer in 
number. These two classes of movements are 
both the result of co-ordinations that the child 
brings into the world with him, and hence he 
has had no conscious part in their formation. 
Neither in their origin nor in their working 
can we assume that consciousness plays any neces- 



74 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

sary part, because, as has been pointed out, it 
does not merely accompany the processes of activ- 
ity, but arises for the purpose of directing it 
and readjusting it. Reflex and instinctive acts 
do not have to be directed (and ordinarily not 
readjusted) ; hence we have no rght to assume 
that these mechanical movements are any more 
conscious in children than in adults. If the 
child is conscious, it must be with reference to 
the other sort of activity, namely, the impulsive. 
In these unco-ordinated movements, then, is the 
basis for the development of consciousness. As 
mere unco-ordinated responses they are, of course, 
no more present in consciousness than are the 
reflex and instinctive movements, but they form 
the raw material for adjustments. They are 
something that can be molded, that lend them- 
selves to adjustment in varying situations. We 
may take these from the start as the indices 
to the nature of the conscious life. As long as 
the only co-ordinations are hereditary, and all 
other movements are purely impulsive, we can 
think of the child's consciousness as being only 
of the most rudimentary sort. Co-ordinate with 
every adaptation of an impulse to an end, how- 
ever, a more and more definite consciousness 
arises. 

We have next to note the process by which 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 75 

impulses become adapted and consciousness de- 
fined. If the child, in throwing its arms about, 
chances to strike something, its movement is 
arrested. The checking of the movement must 
make the child more definitely conscious of it. 
If the checking of the impulsive movement results 
in doing something with the obstacle, the move- 
ment has made the first step toward organization ; 
perhaps it is a block or spool on which the baby's 
hand has chanced to fall, and it is picked up 
instinctively and carried in an instinctive fashion 
to the mouth. But the purposeless impulse has 
here accidentally served an end, and if the child 
is afterward any more definitely conscious of this 
movement than at first, it is no longer as mere 
movement, but as movement-stopped-by-some- 
thing. Perhaps it is assuming too much to think 
of this effect's being produced at first. We can- 
not doubt, however, that in the child's haphazard 
excursions many such accidents will occur, and 
that it is just such incidents that make the various 
movements stand out from one another in the 
child's consciousness. As soon as movement 
stands out, that is, as soon as the consciousness 
of it is interwoven with something that is not 
movement — or, we may say, as soon as conscious- 
ness is not of movement in general, but some 
particular kind of movement — we have the basis 



76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

for indefinite advance. The child at first by no 
means recognizes a separate object; its conscious- 
ness is not that of movement plus object, but of 
movement different in some way; out of the 
vague, undefined consciousness a conscious-com- 
plex has arisen. 

The first co-ordinations to arise are, of course, 
extremely simple, as ability to use the eyes 
together, and later to gaze at some object, such 
as a bright light, or to follow it with the eyes. 
But in every case we have at first accidental, 
impulsive movements, and we cannot doubt but 
that as the movement becomes co-ordinated, con- 
sciousness itself becomes more definite. In the 
formation of these simplest co-ordinations it is 
not easy to see how an intensification of conscious- 
ness is really involved, but the process is the same 
as in the more complex cases where there can be 
no question as to its being produced. We are, 
therefore, surely justified in regarding the first 
beginnings of the complex conscious life as con- 
sisting in the formation of these simple organized 
movements. 

First conscious life an nnspecialined one. — We 
have then, in the child, a consciousness of the kind 
above described — a consciousness in which the 
division of labor has not proceeded far enough 
to warrant our selecting one element in a reaction, 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT ^y 

e. g., a feeling or an idea, and describing the 
reaction in terms of it. In this undifferentiated 
consciousness, as we have seen, true emotions are 
necessarily of the most rudimentary description, 
an emotion, like an idea, being a developed, com- 
plex product, not a primary datum. The various 
expressions of the child in the first few months, 
which have usually been interpreted as evidence 
of emotional states, as we have shown, need have 
no such significance. In a word, the infant starts 
with direct impulsive unco-ordinated responses to 
all sorts of stimuli. Its conscious life increases 
in definiteness and in variety as the activity, 
which it mediates, presents increasing difficulties 
of adjustment to the ends that are to be realized. 



CHAPTER VI 

OBJECTS OF THE CHILD'S WORLD 

The objects of consciousness related to the 
organization of consciousness. — We have de- 
scribed the sort of a consciousness that the infant 
has, how it arises, and how it becomes enriched. 
We may now ask the question : What is he 
conscious of? The answer has already been 
suggested in the previous chapter. If we were 
starting, as did the older psychologists, from the 
side of certain static contents, there would prob- 
ably be no necessity for asking the question at all. 
There would be no reason for assuming that the 
child is conscious of anything different from the 
adult, that is, of things, objects, people, ends to 
be reached, dangers to be avoided, etc. From 
our point of view, however, we are obliged to say 
that the objects of the infant's consciousness vary 
with its organization. The content of its experi- 
ence when its hand is first accidentally arrested by 
a block is certainly not the same as that when it 
has learned to recognize the block by sight, reach 
for it, and throw it. According to the older 
psychology, the first experience might be different 
from the second simply in degree; that is, there 
78 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 79 

would be less of it. From the point of view here 
presented what an object is to the baby or child 
depends entirely on the part it plays in his experi- 
ence, and its part in his experience is determined 
by the sort of experience that reacts upon the 
object. Thus, as stated above, the degree of 
development of consciousness is an essential factor 
in determining the sort of object that enters into 
the child's consciousness. 

In brief, the first objects of consciousness are 
activities. These activities differ from one an- 
other in kind, because they deal with various 
external objects. The external objects the child 
knows not as such, but only as certain modifica- 
tions in his activity. As the variety of possible 
reactions with a single object increases, it begins 
to stand out as a thing, and yet it is recognized 
only as a means or stimulus to a given act, and 
not as having any meaning in itself. To illus- 
trate : The baby has first a mother-experience, but 
this is no evidence that any individual mother is 
recognized. However, as the mother figures in 
many different experiences, she gradually comes 
to stand out as a person, but even yet her sole 
meaning in the infant's consciousness is as a 
person-through-whom-certain-food-and-entertain- 
ment-experiences-may-come. The mother is not 
abstracted as an individual from the experiences 



8o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

she mediates. The emphasis is still on the side 
of the activity. The mother as an external object 
has no independent import. After a while the 
mother is still further abstracted and comes to be 
thought of, less with reference to the experiences 
she makes possible, and more as a part of a 
complex system of ends that are to be attained 
as a whole, among which are the doing of things 
for her pleasure, etc. Here the emphasis is first 
of all on her as a person, and later as a person 
who ought to be acted toward in a certain fashion. 

Stating the course of the above development 
more explicitly, we find that the objects of con- 
sciousness are at first simply certain movements; 
later, combinations of movements which certain 
things have come to symbolize, the things having 
no significance, except as standing for the complex 
of movement. The following instance from Mrs. 
Hall of a child nine months old illustrates the 
point : 

The child struck a cup with his spoon, and hking 
the sound repeated it several times. He then struck 
a sauce plate. As this gave a clearer, more ringing 
sound, he at once noticed the difference. His eyes opened 
wider, and he hit first one and then the other as many as 
twenty times.^ 

Here the new experience with the cup and 
sauce dish meant simply a new activity, and the 

^Child Study Monthly. Quoted by Professor Dewey in 
Mental Development in Early Infancy, p. 77. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 8i 

sight of the objects tended to set the activity free 
over and over again. When any object such as 
a block is handed to the child, and he throws it 
down as often as it can be returned to him, there 
is no question but that his consciousness is ab- 
sorbed in the activity. The object to him means 
a process of throwing. When any object is seen, 
it suggests at once certain reactions toward it ; the 
feeling of these reactions stands for the value of 
the thing as presented to consciousness. The 
thing may here be said to be an emotional whole ; 
that is, its meaning is made up of how it feels to 
act toward it. 

At a later date the thing is not merely the 
representation, or symbol, of certain reactions ; it 
suggests the doing of many different things, some 
of them remote from its immediate implications. 
For example, a child will at first aimlessly open 
drawers, turn door-knobs, etc. ; later the sight of 
the drawers or of the door-knobs calls up the 
image of a further activity; the emphasis shifts 
from the feeling of mere manipulation to the 
larger activity that the manipulation of the object 
makes possible — for instance, taking things out 
of the drawers, opening the door and bowing and 
saying, "How do?" Even here the emphasis 
is rather on the activity than on the thing. The 
thing is still interesting because it sets certain 



82 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

activities going, now a little more remote or 
complex than in the first cases mentioned above, 
v^'here the object invariably stands for a direct 
response. 

The next step is when the thing stands for a 
great many lines of action, and, as their common 
element, it, for the first time, receives the 
emphasis. 

We have made no attempt to locate these 
different attitudes in months or years. No doubt 
one attitude is gradually displaced by another, 
but there is also no question but that in the first 
years of childhood all the attitudes may be 
mingled in successive acts. The emphasis con- 
stantly shifts. Now the object is responded to 
directly; the next moment an image mediates a 
complex of activity with reference to the object. 
To know what an object means to an infant we 
must study its method of response toward it. 
The point here is to show how the nature of the 
content actually varies with the organization of 
the experience. Speaking roughly, the contents 
of consciousness have no objective reference as 
long as there are no conscious co-ordinations of 
movement. It is probable that the emphasis 
remains very largely on the activity rather than 
the thing until five or six years of age. Later 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 83 

things, as such, stand out; and still later the 
complex system of ends, which they may serve, 
come to be interesting. 

It is, however, only the first one of these stages 
that belongs to the infant as discussed thus far. 



CHAPTER VII 

FIRST DIFFERENTIATIONS OF EXPERIENCE 

The mental functions as such at first not 
present. — The aim of this inquiry is not to look 
for static contents, such as ideas or voHtions, 
but rather for successively more complex adapta- 
tions of consciousness to increasingly complex 
ends. This will help us to avoid the fallacy of 
isolating mental elements as existences that are 
more or less complete in themselves. Strictly 
speaking, the child never has ideas or feelings, 
but in every case there are entire reactions in 
which all these elements are so involved as to be 
almost incapable of being separated, a thing for 
which there may be some justification in an adult 
consciousness. When we talk of a child's idea, 
we are dealing with something so inextricably 
bound up with emotion and volition, and more 
than all with motor reactions, that it is hopeless 
to try to catalogue it as a content. We can only 
say of the process in hand that it arises in such a 
situation and performs a certain function. We 
thus do not do it the violence of trying to label 
it according to its most prominent characteristic, 
ignoring the others as mere appurtenances that 

84 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 85 

it were really better to lop off in order to get 
at the real, the essential content. In defining it 
functionally we recognize every element of the 
complex as essential and valid, as having a mean- 
ing in the activity in which it occurs. The state 
itself is a unit, and must be treated so; its com- 
plexity can be defined only on the side of its 
use in the entire activity. 

The mental functions arise with reference to 
the necessities of action. — The problem, then, is 
to note how the consciousness of the child 
becomes gradually adapted to the conditions of 
complex activity. The first step beyond a purely 
impulsive act is the effort to control the stimulus ; 
that is, a movement is set on foot to get the stimu- 
lus again, or to hold it when once obtained. Prob- 
ably no simpler case of this kind can be given 
than of the effort of the child, when once its 
eye has fallen upon a bright object, to keep it 
fixed on it. This sort of an act is different from 
that in which the gaze is fixed on a stationary 
object, or when it is shifted from one stationary 
object to another. 

The following from Miss Shinn illustrates the 
gradual co-ordination of movements in the case 
of her little niece: 

On the twenty-fifth day, as she lay wide awake and 
comfortable in her grandmother's lap, staring thus at her 



86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

face, with an appearance of attention, I leaned down close 
beside so as to bring my face into the field of vision. The 
baby turned her eyes (not head) and gazed at my face 
with the same appearance of attention, even effort, in slight 
tension of brows and lips ; then back to her grandmother's 

face, again to mine, so several times At last she 

seemed to become aware of my red gown, or the lamp light 
striking the shoulder, and not only moved her eyes, but 
threw her head far back to look at my shoulder, with a 

new expression, a sort of dim interest, or eagerness 

The nurse, who was a careful observer, said that the baby 
followed the motion of her hand on the ninth day. I 
could not satisfy myself that she did, even as late as the 
fifth week ; her eyes seemed sometimes briefly to follow the 
moving hand, but she was so active, moving head and eyes 

constantly, that I could not trust the appearance 

On the thirty-third day I tried a candle, and her eyes fol- 
lowed it unmistakably, rolling as far as they could, and then 

the head was turned to follow still farther In the 

fifth week, too, when held up against the shoulder she 
would straighten up her head to see around ; and thereafter 
looking about, as if to see what she could see, became more 
and more her habit, and, together with gazing at faces, was 
her chief occupation till grasping was established.^ 

Such instances might be given for each of the 
other senses. 

The infant's overt activity our only point of 
departure. — As we have said repeatedly, our only 
real datum in a case of this kind is the movement 
itself. The only thing we can say with some 

^Shinn, Notes on the Development of a Child, "University 
of California Studies," Vol. I, p. i6. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 87 

certainty about a movement is that it is more or 
less complex than another. Our hypothesis is 
that in the co-ordination of spontaneous move- 
ments consciousness is the more definite the more 
intricate the co-ordination. 

The mere turning of the eye toward a prom- 
inent object in the field of vision, as in the first 
instance just mentioned, can hardly be more than 
a reflex. It appears much the same sort of an 
act as the closing of the fingers about a pencil, 
if it is placed in the baby's palm. Even the turn- 
ing of the head back and forth from one face to 
the other, and at last to the dress, may be due 
to the conflict of stimuli within the field of vision. 
The object in the center of the field would, so 
to speak, exhaust itself and the surrounding 
objects become relatively more important; hence 
the gaze would be fixed on them in turn. In this 
case, however, an image of the grandmother's 
face may have persisted while she was looking 
at the aunt's, and vice versa. This image may 
have been reinforced by the presence of the actual 
face on the outskirts of her field of vision. If 
there was such an image, it must have served as 
a stimulus to turn the head back and forth. The 
following of the moving candle with the eyes 
and head involves a slightly more complex co- 
ordination; the ability to hold the eyes on the 



88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

stimulus, and to turn the head so as to get it 
again when it had passed beyond the reach of the 
eyes, points to the presence of a consciousness of 
the sensation, not merely as a sensation, but as 
a sensation to be kept or to be found again. 
The last case mentioned — that of holding up the 
head and looking about — is clearly a case of effort 
to get stimuli which are recognized as existing, 
but which must be sought out. 

Consciousness and the control of stimuli. — 
There are two main points here. The first is 
that the spontaneous, undifferentiated activity of 
the child has even now at the fifth week begun 
to differentiate, to adapt itself to the conditions 
of more adequate activity. The second is that 
there is probably here present some sort of a 
consciousness of the value of a stimulus not pres- 
ent, and this consciousness produces an effort to 
get that stimulus. We may say with some cer- 
tainty that the effort to get a fairly definite 
stimulus, or to hold it when obtained, is at least 
evidence of the presence of something more in 
consciousness than a mere feeling. The moment 
there is an adjustment to be made that is not 
provided for in the inherited reflexes or instincts, 
that moment we must have the beginnings of an 
organized consciousness. This persistence of a 
previous stimulus in consciousness we may call 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 89 

an image, and we may note that the sole aim of 
its persistence is to get itself reinstated as sensa- 
tion. There is no such thing as the carrying 
over of a previous activity, except with reference 
to further experience. The necessity of control- 
ling a stimulus is the essential basis for all mental 
differentiation, and the means of differentiation 
is the persistence of value of the past act or 
sensation that furnishes a stimulus for a new or 
further activity. Perhaps every act persists, or 
leaves its image, but it is not until this image 
functions, or is used, not until it directs further 
activity, that we can say that consciousness has 
increased in power. This may begin to occur 
very early; as we saw above, by the fourth or 
fifth week. 

We may repeat here what we have tried to 
emphasize before : namely, that it is useless to 
attempt to say when consciousness begins, or 
when there is memory or volition or any other 
"mental power." We cannot say that at that 
point the child was incapable of having ideas and 
at this he begins to have them. We can only 
say that, zvhatevcr the child has had previously, he 
here and now has his knowledge attitude defined 
more clearly, or here it is more necessary that 
such an attitude should exist than it was then, and 
we can tell how it has been necessary in terms of 
the complexity of the accompanying activity. 



90 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

The chief significance of any movement its 
connection with other activity. — Instead of trying 
to catalogue the child's movements, his various 
sense-activities, his feelings, etc., as most observ- 
ers of children do, we should more profitably 
note in exact order what he does day by day, 
without any attempt to say what particular 
point these acts illustrate, watching simply their 
increasing complexity and the number of elements 
involved in them. The chief significance of a 
new movement, a better management of the eye, 
a sense of position, of creeping, grasping, etc., 
is not that it simply occurs, but in what sort of 
an activity it occurs, what it helps to do, why it 
has arisen. To separate the sense-experience or 
the particular hand-movement, or talking, or the 
recognition of color, from the setting in which 
it arose is to deprive it of its main significance. 

Perhaps it is not desirable here to give too 
many detailed observations. But even if it were, 
it would be difficult to glean from the literature, 
as we have it, examples that would be thoroughly 
satisfactory. Child observers, one and all, have 
been under the delusion that they are to take in 
isolation certain aspects of the child's conscious- 
ness and describe them in connection with similar 
aspects at all other times. Thus the development 
of grasping is described in itself; the same of 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 91 

creeping, drawing, etc. Now, there is no doubt 
that they first show themselves in random and 
spontaneous ways, but there is also little doubt 
but that they manifest themselves chiefly as some 
previous co-ordination furnishes a stimulus that 
calls them out. Thus creeping undoubtedly 
originates in and of itself in certain unco- 
ordinated movements of the legs that happen to 
get adjusted so as to move the body, and the 
movement is repeated from time to time, just as in 
the case of the eye when it learned to follow the 
lamp. But for the further development of creep- 
ing we must certainly take into account the stimu- 
lus that comes from seeing objects to be reached 
and grasped. Not that they stimulate creeping; 
they rather define it, so that it becomes more than 
a mere impulse. We are not interested so much 
in when a child stands alone as how, standing 
alone, the second time is connected with what 
else he is doing. Neither are we as much inter- 
ested in when a child first says ina7i as in knowing 
zvhat he was doing at the time that made him say 
it, or what he did afterward because he said it. 

It is the entire act that is important; and the 
drawing activity, or the talking, or the grasping, 
is chiefly significant in the way in which it helps 
to make a more complex act. 

As was said previously, it would not be profit- 



92 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

able here to give detailed illustrations of this 
increasing complexity. The point of greatest 
importance for the teacher is to get the concept 
of how consciousness grows, of how it is related 
to action. There can be no more illuminating 
or fruitful concept for one engaged in the work 
of practical teaching. It lies at the very basis 
of every sound system of methods. 

The mental functions specializations in com- 
plex activities. — Let us, after the somewhat long 
digression, return to the baby's act of following 
a moving object with the eyes. We said that 
such a simple act of controlling a stimulus was 
made possible by the persistence of a previous 
activity, and this we called an image, in so far as 
it served to produce a further activity. The new 
act is not impulsive, as the previous ones have 
been. The form of the impulsive act is always 
uncertain. The act resulting from an image bears 
definite relation to its stimulus. 

We can see here how the types of mental 
activity — feeling, ideation, and volition — are but 
different phases of this effort to control or gtt 
a certain stimulus. In proportion as the effort is 
little or the co-ordination necessarily simple, we 
should naturally expect these types to be corre- 
spondingly vague. 

The consciousness of the organization of the 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 93 

act with reference to this image is sensation, 
feeling, or emotion. The image is idea in so far 
as it furnishes a cue for a new adjustment. The 
direction of impulse by this image is volition. 
The image is emotion, so far as it contains the 
value of a previous activity. In every act we 
thus have all three aspects of consciousness. We 
can see, then, how erroneous is the view that the 
sensory side, or the feeling side, develops first, 
and that volition and ideational processes, such 
as memory, imagination, and reasoning, come 
only later. As we have tried to show, every act 
contains them all, and while in a given act the 
consciousness may be directed more to one aspect 
than to another, so as to warrant our saying that 
here is an emotional act, there an intellectual act, 
it is impossible for one to be defined, or become 
definite, and not the other. 

Illustrations from Miss Shinn.^-The follow- 
ing instance from Miss Shinn^ is a good illustra- 
tion of the progress made in the complexity of 
the act : "The first unmistakable recognition of 
sight alone was on the eightieth day, when she 
smiled and gave a joyous cry on seeing her 
grandfather enter." This is given by Miss Shinn 
as an instance of the recognition of a person by 
sight. Its chief significance for us lies in the 

^Op. cit., p. IS- 



94 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

complexity of its organization. Here the baby- 
has, without doubt, an image of herself playing 
with the grandfather. This image is the basis for 
a certain adjustment which from its very intensity 
comes to consciousness as joy; for, as we said 
above, feeling is the consciousness of the organ- 
ization of the act with reference to the image. 
Or the image may be said to be the emotion, in 
so far as the adjustments of the previous frolics 
that it stands for come to consciousness with no 
further activity immediately possible. 

The way one act reinforces another, and hence 
makes still more complicated mental processes 
necessary, is well illustrated in the results of the 
development of grasping. Quoting from Miss 
Shinn again : 

At just sixteen weeks old (one hundred and thirteenth 
day) she made a near approach to deliberate grasping; 
she looked at her mother's hand held out to her, and while 
looking made fumbling motions toward it with her own 
hand, till she struck it, then seized it and tried to carry it 
to her mouth ; and twice again on the same day I saw her 
do this. She would not aim a grasp at the object, under 
visual guidance, but would look at it, move her hands 
vaguely, as if feeling for it, then strike them toward it with 
fingers open till they touched; then she would take hold. 
She looked more than before at the objects held in her 
hands, but still vaguely; and indeed the whole process had 
a vague and mechanical appearance, as if there were little 
volition about it. The one hundred and fourteenth day 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 95 

she got hold of a good many objects by a kind of vague 
clawing at them, looking at them more and more as she 
did so/ 

Here the sight of the mother's hand undoubt- 
edly aroused an image of a previous act in which 
a seen object was grasped — a vague image of 
course, but unmistakably there, for the hand re- 
sponded to it. Here the activity is much more 
complex than before, because two previously 
independent acts interact through an image. 
The sight stimulus is controlled still better by 
being co-ordinated with a hand-activity through 
an image of an act in which the eye saw an object 
that was being touched more distinctly than usual. 
Here, by chance perhaps, the seen object suggested 
the grasping experience, which was at once initi- 
ated. Immediately before this there had been no 
noticeable interaction of sight and touch. Miss 
Shinn says: 

I now watched vigilantly for the first sign of any 
visual guidance ; but for some time in vain. The baby con- 
tinued to touch objects either by accident, or, perhaps, by 
fumbling for them, looking in some other direction in- 
attentively; but the object once felt she would seize it with 
clear intention and carry it to her mouth. If by chance her 
eyes did turn toward the object, it was with entire inatten- 
tion.° 

This illustrates admirably the way in which 

^Op. cit., p. 313. 'Op. cit., p. 312. 



96 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

one activity can go on parallel with another with- 
out any assistance from it. But the child has 
about gotten to where grasping must be better 
regulated. It is too uncertain to have to depend 
on fumbling to get objects. The time is ripe 
for the eye to enter and assist in the business. 
Miss Shinn's account of how it proceeded is most 
admirable : 

On the ninety-ninth day 1 noticed that she several 
times looked down at an object while grasping, but never 
before she laid hold and never with any appearance of 
attention. In the following week (fifteenth) she quite 
commonly let her eyes rest blankly on her hands and 
objects in them, after she had fumbled about till she 
touched an object and while she was lifting it; then her 
glance would leave it, and it would be carried to her 
mouth by feeling only.^ 

Here we have the beginnings of the co- 
ordination by which the sight stimulus and the 
image awakened by it can be defined, not only 
by more seeing, but by manipulation with the 
hands. Then follows the seizing of the mother's 
hand, as noted above. 

But with regard to putting objects once seized into her 
mouth, the volition was clear : as far back as the ninety- 
sixth day her grandmother had seen her open her mouth 
while getting hold of her rattle, and now it was common ; 
she would open her mouth and put her hand forward as 
soon as she touched an object, even while fumbling to get 
a good hold, but never at sight of it.^ 

^Op. cit., pp. 312, 313. "Op. cit., p. 314. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 97 

We must understand volition, in the sense 
defined previously, as the direction of an impulse 
by an image, and this unmistakably occurred. 
The touch of the object with the hand aroused 
the image of a previous activity in which a 
touched object became an object involved with 
the mouth, whereupon the mouth-activity was set 
up; a simple case of volition, differing from a 
purely reflex act in the fact that a previous experi- 
ence of touching things and putting them into 
the mouth was involved, and the persistence of 
that previous act made the adjustment for the 
new one occur before the object touched the 
mouth. 

Miss Shinn thinks the first real grasping 
occurred on the one hundred and eighteenth day : 

I held the baby up before a picture on the wall, which 
she was accustomed to look at for some seconds with in- 
terest. The light shining on the walnut frame seemed 
to catch her eye; she looked at it, put out her hand a 
little uncertainly and waveringly, and first touched and 
then took hold of the edge of the frame I then brought 
her rattle and held it out some two inches from her hand : 
she put out her hand in the same uncertain way and took 
it. In the afternoon she had somewhat relapsed from 
this attainment ; when the rattle was offered her she 
looked at it, making some sounds of desire, moved her 
arms vaguely, and finally brought both hands down about 
it, on either side. As soon as she touched it her movements 
became definite, and she laid hold of it and carried it skil- 
fully to her mouth.^ 

^Op. cit., p. 314. 



98 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

From this time on, eye and hand work together 
with even greater precision. No better illustra- 
tion could be given of gradually increasing com- 
plexity in activity, involving with every step the 
images of past experiences and conditioned by 
the fact that the values of these past references 
are available for present activity. 



CHAPTER VIII 

DIFFERENTIATION OF MENTAL FUNCTIONS— Con- 
tinued 

Summary regarding the development of inter- 
co-ordinations of hand and eye. — In the acts of 
grasping described in the preceding chapter we 
had a series of increasingly complex movements. 
In seizing an object the baby had first to depend 
on touching it by chance with the hand, when, of 
course, the fingers instinctively closed over it. 
This was a stimulus to raise the object in an 
indefinite fashion to the face, perhaps by chance 
striking the mouth. In time the co-ordination 
between hand and mouth became more definite, 
as the touching of the object aroused a vague 
image of the process of manipulating it with the 
mouth. But it is cumbersome to depend on 
chance, or a vague image of movement, in grasp- 
ing an object. There clearly cannot be a very 
adequate development of hand-movements in 
entire independence of the eye. We have seen 
how the baby begins to look vaguely at the object 
grasped after it has touched it ; then, a little later, 
to look before touching and feel vaguely after it. 
The hesitating movement, however, ceases the 
moment the object is grasped, for the already 

99 

L.cfC. 



loo THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

familiar hand co-ordination is at once set up. 
The next step is for the eye to assist the hand 
in getting very rapidly all sorts of new co- 
ordinations. That is, the eye not only assists the 
hand in getting its stimulus, but it guides it to 
new and more complex ends after it is stimulated. 
After an evolution of this kind, when the baby 
sees the rattle it is not merely a seen rattle, but 
a rattle that has been handled in various ways, 
and the visual rattle serves to set going a lot of 
manipulatory activities. These, as they become 
more and more complex, require increasingly the 
presence of images of previous acts to effect the 
adjustments necessary. It is when the child is 
looking at the rattle, and for the first time vaguely 
reaching for it, that he is most acutely conscious 
of his past adjustments in dealing with it. But 
after he has learned to grasp it easily as soon as 
he sees it, there is no need for the persistence of 
any imagery, for the sight of it immediately sets 
the hand co-ordination to working. 

Images at iirst vague in reference, then more 
deUnite. — As various new experiences gather 
about the rattle, the sight of it tends to call them 
up, as so many problematic elements ; but as they 
become familiar the images necessary to set them 
free become less vaguely present. 

This may be well illustrated by the way a 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT loi 

baby learns to remove a cover from a box that it 
can easily handle. The cover comes off by 
chance at first. When this happens, the complex 
of sensori-motor experiences with the box is 
enriched by a new element. As the baby fumbles 
with the box and its lid, the vague presence of the 
usage of the box with its cover on renders some 
direction to the random movements. Finally, 
in a somewhat chance fashion, the lid gets on the 
box again. Here another element is added to 
the box experience, because a new activity with 
the box has been chanced upon. The image of 
the sensori-motor complex involved in taking 
off and putting on the cover of the box persists 
from moment to moment, as long as there is any 
difficulty in getting the thing done, being itself 
rendered more definite as the act is repeated. 
The successful parts of the different attempts tend 
to be gradually sifted out as the act is performed 
over and over again. Such a newly discovered 
co-ordination is usually repeated many times, each 
repetition making the image stand out more defi- 
nitely, and the act itself in consequence becoming 
easier. When the co-ordination is thoroughly 
worked out, the mere sensory stimulus of sight 
is, as was pointed out before, sufficient to produce 
the act. 

It is safe to say that the infant really never 



102 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

has mere sense-stimulations or mere motor re- 
sponses, but always a more or less complex union 
of the two/ It is not conscious now of a visual 
sensation, now of a motor response. The seen 
or felt object means an act, the value of which, 
in certain cases, can be recalled to help define 
a new activity. The more complex the new 
response sought for, the more complex must be 
the part played by the values of previous acts, 
or sensori-motor co-ordinations. It was shown 
in the preceding chapter that it is this gradually 
increasing complexity of the functions of the 
image, or the past act in so far as it is connected 
with further activity, that we call intellection, 
emotion, and volition. These are simply names 
for various aspects and degrees of complexity 
of the reaction of the image on the new act. 

Memory. — When Miss Shinn's niece reached 
out for the grandmother's hand, the presence of 
the image of previous grasping of a seen object 
might be called memory. We have no reason to 
suppose that any previous activities ever came 
to consciousness, that is, were remembered, except 
in cases of this kind, where there was uncertainty 
in the act about to follow. In other words, 
memory is strictly a function of a certain crisis 

^Dewey, "The Reflex Arc Concept," Psychological Review, 
July, 1896. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 103 

in activity. Originally there is no such thing 
as mere memory, but always a revival of certain 
elements in a past experience in the effort to get 
a new experience. 

Other intellectual attitudes. — In case there are 
two different objects to grasp, or the grasping 
of one involves co-ordinations not represented 
in the image, we have the beginnings of reason- 
ing, judgment, choice, etc. The act being so 
complicated, an elaboration of the adjusting ap- 
paratus is necessary. 

The sight of the mother, nurse, or bottle suggests vari- 
ous experiences with which it is customarily associated. 
Expectation, or anticipation, is thus at first always con- 
nected with recognition. The child recognizes persons 
and things on the basis of their suggesting some further 
experience habitually associated with them, and he anti- 
cipates on the basis of what he recognizes. Both recogni- 
tion and anticipation involve a presented experience and 
an imaged experience which are related as factors in a 
larger experience. Comparison comes in here with more 
conscious recognition of relationship. The infant compares 
different means with reference to the different results they 
accomplish, and vice versa. Recall, for example, the in- 
stances quoted of the striking first a cup and then a saucer 
in order to get two different sounds ; or the striking of a 
plate when the other hand was touching it and when it 
was not, in order to secure two different sorts of sounds. 
That is, of course, no comparison in the abstract sense — in 
the sense of an intellectual operation entirely separated 
from any practical end ; but none the less the consciousness 



104 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

of two alternative results to be got by two different acts 
involves comparison. Or, again, comparison may be seen 
in the selection of acts to serve as means for the accom- 
plishment of a desired end. This is obvious in the instance 
quoted of the effort of the child to maintain a standing 
position and at the same time play with the window shade.^ 

The volitional attitude. — We have already 
defined a voluntary act as one resulting from 
the presence of an image in the child's mind. 
Such an act might be called a controlled one — 
controlled by the values of previous acts, so that 
it is no longer impulsive. If we should con- 
fine ourselves to the term "control," we should 
escape many of the fictions that attach to the 

^"Mental Development in Early Infancy," Transactions of 
the Illinois Society {or Child-Study, Vol. IV, pp. 79 fif. The 
instance referred to is quoted on p. 78 from Mrs. Hall. It is 
as follows : "The baby [in the tenth month] was lifted up to 
look through the window, when his attention was attracted 
by the upper part of the lower window sash which the child 
could scarcely reach with the finger tips of his right hand. 
He succeeded in getting a firm hold and in pulling himself 
high enough to obtain a hold with the left hand also. In this 
way he raised himself so that he could look over the sash. 
After a moment, forgetting that it was his own effort that 
held him up, he loosened his hold and dropped back to his 
former level. He repeated the previous effort until he had 
regained his position, when, desiring to grasp the window 
shade, he again released his hold and once more dropped back. 
A third time he raised himself ; this time he retained his hold 
with one hand while he pulled at the shade with the other. 
When he became tired he changed his hands, not loosening 
his hold with one hand until he had firmly grasped the sash 
with the other." 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 105 

term "volition," and at the same time have a 
single term that correctly describes what is really 
a continuous process from birth. Volition is not 
a new factor that comes in at a certain stage; it 
is simply a specialization of activity by which the 
process of growing control is rendered more 
efficient through the carrying over of the values 
of previous experience into new acts. "Voli- 
tion" is then purely a relative term. A volitional, 
or controlled, activity has its meaning entirely 
with reference to the degree of mental organiza- 
tion in which it occurs. It is not a something 
that can be described in and of itself. 

Criticism of Preyer's discussion of volition. — 
Preyer has worked out an elaborate scheme for 
the development of voluntary activity. This 
highest class of action is, according to him, pre- 
ceded by and made possible by instinctive, reflex, 
impulsive, imitative, and expressive movements,^ 
Movement, he holds, can be voluntary only, first, 
when it is preceded directly by ideas, one of which 
finally causes the movement ; secondly, when the 
movement is previously known, in a general way 
at least; thirdly, when it is characterized by a 
more or less definite conscious aim ; and, fourthly, 
when it may be inhibited.^ These characteristics 

^The Senses and the Will, Part II. 
'Ibid., p. 192. 



io6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

are probably true of all normal adult volition. 
The objection to applying them to the child is that 
it makes an impassable gap between the earlier 
and later forms of activity. For example, such 
a description seems to afford no basis for a unity 
between a voluntary and imitative activity. 
Preyer's description is applicable to our highly 
specialized attitudes, but we want not so much 
to find out what such an attitude is as to discover 
how the first specializations from direct response 
to stimulus- arise. Any such specialization result- 
ing in a control of movement would surely have 
the same function in a mind of the infant's degree 
of organization as the more highly developed 
forms do in adult activity. The function of voli- 
tion in the adult is to control activity, or, rather, 
it is that aspect of an act that represents its 
direction, or control. Since in the infant we 
find, with each increasing complexity of action, 
a correspondingly increased need of control of 
the activity, we must regard the means by which 
it is accomplished as functionally the same as in 
the adult. 

The earlier activity, which Preyer calls imita- 
tive, or mere direct response to stimulus, from 
our point of view it not merely the raw material 
from which volitional activity is developed; it 
is rather the volition itself of a life of low degree 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 107 

of specialization. To call it simply material from 
which will is developed is to apply to it a criterion 
from outside the situation in which it occurs. 
Each act must be judged with reference to the 
situation that calls it forth and with reference to 
the function it serves in that situation. 

How arbitrary and meaningless it is to take 
acts of varying degree of organization and hold 
one as voluntary and the other as not, according 
to some fixed standard, is illustrated in the fol- 
lowing passage from Preyer. He says : 

Only when both occur together, the representation of 
the movement, and the expectation of its result, is deHb- 
erate movement possible, which, unfortunately, is too often 
prevented from showing itself early through early training. 
Often even in the second year we can tell only with diffi- 
culty, or cannot tell at all, whether the' child acts inde- 
pendently or not — for example, when (in the sixteenth 
month) he opens and shuts cupboards, picks up from the 
floor, and brings objects that he threw down.^ 

The difficulty here, from Preyer' s standpoint, 
is a real one. The obstacles to applying a sub- 
jective criterion to the child's actions are insuper- 
able. Preyer continues : 

When, on the contrary, at this period he holds, en- 
tirely of his own motion, an earring that had been taken 
off, to the ear from which it was taken, I am inclined to 
see in that already a sign of deliberation, understanding, 
and choice, whereas in the mere making of noise — it may 

^Op. cit., p. 328. 



io8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

be by opening and slamming to the cover of a box, or by 
the eager tearing of newspapers — there is rather the co- 
operation of pleasure in noise and movement vi^ith gratifica- 
tion in the putting forth of power than of deliberation and 
choice. Yet it seemed to me worthy of note that my 
child one day (in the fourteenth month) took off and 
put on the cover of a can not less than seventy-nine times, 
without stopping a moment. His attention, meantime, 
strained to the utmost, indicated that the intellect was 
taking part.^ 

In each activity mentioned in the above extract 
we have varying degrees of control. There is 
no reason why an act should be classed as invol- 
untary because it is accompanied by "pleasure in 
noise and movement" or the "gratification in the 
putting forth of power." It is to be feared that 
these concomitants are characteristic of many 
highly organized adult activities. The eager 
tearing of newspapers represents a co-ordination 
for getting certain experiences, which the child 
expects to get because he obtained them in a pre- 
ceding act. The image of the previous activity 
is as surely as present here as in the case of the 
earring. Pleasure does not cause the activity in 
the one case, as Preyer seems to think, nor does 
a mystical fiction called choice supervene in the 
other. In each case the activity gets a certain 
control, a certain direction, because a value from 

^Op. cit., pp. 327, 328. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 109 

a previous activity is available. If there is no 
deliberation in the opening of cupboard doors, 
etc., it is because there is nothing in the situation 
that demands it. There is, however, an element 
present that, to the situation as it is and to the 
child organized as he is, serves exactly the same 
function that deliberation might serve in a differ- 
ently organized situation and individual. 

A further point in Preyer's discussion should 
be noted before we pass from this phase of the 
subject. He holds that "willing cannot take 
place until after the forming of ideas. "^ Here 
again we have the assumption of the growth of 
certain powers, or faculties, in serial order. 
How much better to regard idea and control as 
the two co-ordinate aspects of a single act of 
which, as the image is defined, so its active side, 
its control aspect, is more adequate, and the con- 
trol of movement in turn reacts on the image to 
make it more definite. Aside from actual situa- 
tions of movement and the constantly recurring 
necessity of controlling it in these situations, 
there is no such thing as a development of "idea- 
tional, or representative, activity," the association 
of the idea of a movement with the idea of the 
object desired as the aim of the movement. 

^Op. cit., p. 331. 



CHAPTER IX 

INHIBITION 

Before passing from the subject of the develop- 
ment of control, we must give some attention to 
what is known as the inhibition of activity. 
Preyer regards the inhibition of a reflex as an 
evidence of will in the child, and in this Tracy 
agrees.^ Preyer holds that children should be 
exercised as early as possible in the conscious 
inhibition of reflex movements, as it has an 
important influence on the cultivation of the 
child's will. 

The conception of inhibition. — Now, by an 
inhibition of an act we mean the checking or 
stopping of it, not by any mysterious force or fiat, 
but by another act. A voluntary act may be 
inhibited by another voluntary act through the 
arising in consciousness of an image that lies 
back of the first act. A reflex may be inhibited 
by a violent sensory stimulus. Thus Preyer tells 
us that he caused the auditory reflexes in new- 
born guinea pigs to be inhibited by pinching the 
ears sharply.^ Fie also mentions a sixteen-day- 
old child that was screaming violently, but became 

^The Senses and the Will, p. 227. ^Ibid., p. 227. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT in 

"quiet in an instant when it was laid face down- 
ward on a pillow."^ He mentions the quieting 
effect on very young babies of singing and play- 
ing on the piano. According to Preyer, however, 
"we have not here to do with inhibitions of 
reflexes in the strict sense of the term, but with 
the supplanting of a feeling of discomfort, along 
with its motor consequences or a reflex activity, 
by means of a new impression."^ 

But this is exactly what we have held that 
inhibition really is — the supplanting of one sort 
of activity by another. Preyer evidently thinks 
of inhibition as a fiat of some kind that comes 
in and simply annihilates an activity, leaving 
nothing in its place. From our point of view 
such a thing is inconceivable. Just as in the 
physical world a moving body can be stopped 
only by another body sufficiently large, at rest or 
in motion, with some at least of its elements 
pointing in a direction opposite to that of the 
motion checked, so, whatever be the cause of an 
act, whether psychical or physical, that act can 
cease only when the energy that stimulates it is 
exhausted, or when the energy is diverted into 
other channels. 

Activity inhibited by activity. — That this is the 
most satisfactory way of viewing the facts of 

Ubid., p. 228. -Ibid., p. 228. 



112 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

inhibition we shall see if v/e review those 
instanced by Preyer. The case of the screaming 
child quieted by being laid face downward is 
clearly, as he points out, a case of the supplanting 
of one attitude by another. The nervous energy 
used in crying is diverted and scattered by the 
change of position. The hushing effect of music 
is undoubtedly due to the scattering of the impulse 
to fret or cry through the rhythmical excitation 
of the entire body by the external harmony. Any 
excitation like crying — in fact, any emotion or 
any special activity — involves the centralizing of 
nervous energy in certain portions of the body. 
If this energy can be collected in some other 
portion, or if it can be scattered rhythmically in 
every direction, the activity is inhibited by another 
definite act, or inhibited by being dissipated into 
a diffused activity of the entire organism. 

This is the true functional point of view. 
Every activity is functionally related to the situa- 
tion in which it occurs. The only way for an 
activity to cease short of sheer exhaustion is for 
the situation to change so that a new act appears 
as a function of the changed conditions. To 
hold that an act could be stopped by a pure fiat 
would involve us in the position that there is no 
organic relation between our activity and the situ- 
ations in which we exist. If this point of view 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 113 

is true, inhibition is by no means an indication 
of an organized volitional attitude, as Preyer and 
Tracy hold. Whenever one act checks and takes 
the place of another, we have true inhibition, 
whether it be in the infant two or three weeks 
old or in the adult. Such a substitution of acts 
becomes evidence of a developed consciousness ; 
that is, one containing a volitional attitude when 
there is a consciousness of the results of the 
inhibited act, or when new elements in a situation 
are realized and sought for to the exclusion of 
the previous line of action. In other words, a 
counteracting activity may be set up either to 
stop the previous activity or because it is itself 
more desirable. In either case we have simply 
one act crowded out by another. Preyer men- 
tions the inhibition of the evacuation reflex begin- 
ning toward the end of the first year. At the 
beginning of the tenth month, he tells us, 

the desire to evacuate the bowels was in the daytime, in 
a healthful and waking condition, almost invariably an- 
nounced by great restlessness. If the child was then 
attended to, the evacuation took place invariably not till 
several seconds after giving him the proper position. The 
child needed so much time, therefore, in order to annul 
the inhibition by means of his now unquestionably authen- 
ticated will.* 

We really have here nothing different in kind 

^Op. cit., pp. 230, 231. 



114 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

from the case of the child sixteen days old, men- 
tioned above. The reflex is inhibited by the 
energy being thrown into a new act, involv- 
ing changes in the visceral, and especially the 
abdominal, region, resulting in the control of the 
sphincter vesicae. When the child is in the 
proper position, the innervation that inhibited the 
reflex must be inhibited by the reinnervation of 
the reflex. By this statement we perhaps do not 
add anything to Preyer's account, except to put 
it from a different point of view; namely, that 
of regarding the inhibition of an act as always 
accomplished through the enstatement of another 
act. When the time comes for the inhibited act 
to be performed, the interim, which Preyer calls 
the time required for the inhibition to be annulled 
by the will, is merely an evidence that the inner- 
vation of the contrary act was so strong that a 
few moments were required to effect the transfer 
into the now proper channel. 

The relation of inhibition to mental growth. — 
What is the relation of inhibition to the processes 
of mental growth? As we have seen, it is not 
a peculiar power that intervenes to stop an act, 
but simply names the possibility of the substitu- 
tion of one act for another. It is with this inter- 
pretation that we must read Preyer's statement 
that decrease of general reflex tendency in the 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 115 

earliest years is identical with increase of inhibi- 
tion of reflexes.^ His use of "reflex" here corre- 
sponds in the main with our term "impulsive," 
or "unorganized," movements. We should say, 
then, that this means simply that decrease in gen- 
eral tendency to impulsive movements is due 
partly to the organization of these impulses into 
definite activities, and partly to the displacement 
and crowding out of others through these organ- 
ized activities. The increased inhibition of 
reflexes is simply, then, the process we have been 
describing all along — the process in which activity 
becomes adapted to meet certain ends, and in 
which irrelevant, and hence hindering, activity is 
crowded out. 

The point of this discussion has been to show 
that we have here no extraneous elements, no new 
factor in inhibition, but only a name for the fact 
that one act may supplant another. 

^Op. cit., p. 231. 



CHAPTER X 

IMITATION 

In the preceding pages the mental hfe has been 
regarded as arising with reference to the demands 
of an increasing complexity of action. Our state- 
ment has been entirely from the standpoint of the 
child himself. That is, our emphasis has always 
been on the equipment of the child, and the way 
this was differentiated and defined, as he had 
more and more complex things to do. 

The preceding points may be stated from the 
social side. — This same process can, however, he 
stated from the standpoint of the social organism 
in which it is necessarily worked out. This is an 
important point to keep in mind. The failure to 
do so has been the cause of many attempts to find 
in the child the beginnings of a social conscious- 
ness. There is no doubt but that the beginnings 
of such an attitude are in the child, but most 
investigators have sought for it as if it were 
one element along with certain other elements of 
emotion, zvill, etc. It has been sought for as one 
of the elements of the process of development, 
instead of being regarded as the process itself 
from a particular point of view. 

Ii6 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 117 

The social consciousness is not a separate 
aspect of consciousness. It is the same conscious- 
ness that we have described, with the emphasis 
on the situation in which it arises, rather than on 
the individual whose action it mediates. Since 
mental development is within a social environ- 
ment, it is itself a process of socialization, and 
each differentiation of mental function is as much 
an increase in social consciousness as in individual 
efficiency. 

Imitation a social rather than an individual 
category. — Since mental development is a social- 
izing process, the more important phases of the 
interaction of child and society have received 
special names, as if special forces were here oper- 
ative, or as if the child had certain special faculties 
through which he takes advantage of the social 
values in his environment. Imitation is regarded 
by many as such a special dispensation by which 
the child is socialized. Professor Baldwin, in 
his effort to work out imitation as this funda- 
mental socializing element in human conscious- 
ness, has proved, as conclusively as could be 
desired, the truth of the position we have 
advanced above, namely, that all mental develop- 
ment may be stated indifferently from the side of 
the individual or from that of society. He has 
illustrated the truth of our position by finding 



ii8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

it necessary to reduce all mental life ultimately 
to the imitative type. We have held that all 
consciousness, as it differentiates in a social 
environment, is thereby socialized; in other 
words, that socialization is one aspect of all devel- 
oping consciousness. If this conception is true, 
Professor Baldwin, by setting up imitation as 
an ultimate category of the social consciousness, 
is obliged naturally to make it synonymous with 
mental development itself. The reasoning is 
logical, granting the premise, and may be put 
thus : If imitation is the means by which social- 
ization is effected, it must be a fundamental 
category of the mental life, since this process is 
really from one point of view the sum and sub- 
stance of mental development. The problem, of 
course, is whether imitation is such a means, and 
whether, if it is, it is not merely a restatement 
of that which we are already perfectly familiar 
with under a different terminology. 

Before discussing further this aspect of imita- 
tion, let us see if it is susceptible of a functional 
statement. We have already characterized it as 
a social category, a statement from the stand- 
point of society of the process of development, 
which we have been describing in individual 
terms. To society practically everything the 
child does, as it gradually comes to maturity, is 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 119 

an imitation of the more adequate activity of 
older members of society. The child must learn 
to walk, to talk, to use his hands in certain ways ; 
he must dress, eat, sleep, after the manner of his 
elders. He learns to read, to write, and to 
engage in a certain vocation, and probably several 
avocations, after the copies set by some of the 
older people with whom he lives. ^ From the 
standpoint of society a good deal, if not all, of 
what a child does is easily to be traced to some 
copy set by environing conditions. He is con- 
stantly copying the activities, customs, notions, 
etc., that surround him. 

What do the imitative activities mean to the 
child f — Let us now turn to the child. Does 
imitation mean to him what it means to the 
onlooker? With the child the emphasis is not 
on the copying of a certain act, but on the attain- 
ment of a certain experience that comes through 
the copying or imitating. From the first begin- 
nings of control, the child is seeking to define his 
experience, to render it more definite. He is on 
the alert for stimuli that will enrich and enlarge 
his experience. Every stimulus is a suggestion 
to activity, at first perhaps merely to grasp some 
object, later to throw it; later the manipulations 
of the object by other people furnish stimuli to 

^Calkins, Introduction to Psychology, p. 332. 



I20 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

even more complex acts on the child's part. 
Here the so-called imitative stage begins. He 
sees an elder writing with a pencil. When he 
has a chance he picks it up himself and tries to 
mark on paper. To an observer of the child, 
here is a case of imitation, but to the child it is 
an attempt to get a new experience with the pencil 
through the image furnished by the adult. In 
other words, to the child's consciousness the sig- 
nificance of the act is not in it as an imitation, 
but in that it helps define a new experience that 
is felt as desirable. This point is admirably 
brought out by Professor Baldwin in the follow- 
ing paragraph : 

Was there ever a group of children who did not leave 
the real school to make a play school, erecting a throne 
for one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? 
Was there ever a child who did not play "church," and 
force her father, if possible, into the pulpit? Were there 
ever children who did not "buy" things from fancied stalls 
in every corner of the nursery, when they had once seen 
an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this: 
the child's personality grows ; growth is always through 
action; he clothes upon himself the scenes of his life and 
acts them out; so he grows in what he is, what he under- 
stands, and what he is able to perform} 

The so-called imitation on the part of animals 
may be explained, or rather stated, in the same 

^Mental Development in the Child and the Race, p. 361. 
Italics mine. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 121 

way. When a monkey lathers his face in imita- 
tion of a man whom he has just seen shaving, 
he is trying to define, so to speak, the experience 
to himself, which he feels only vaguely through 
the eye; or we may say that the vivid visual 
image of the man shaving produces the same 
activity in the monkey — a result of the fixation 
of his attention on the shaving. So with the two- 
year-old girl who twirled an imaginary moustache 
after the copy set her by a youth who was oppo- 
site her at the table. There was a movement 
of the fingers at a certain place on the face that 
seemed to be worth something, and the baby 
girl did her best to incorporate its value into her 
own experience of sundry hand-movements. She 
was not copying; she was getting a new experi- 
ence} 

We cannot doubt but that the child's first 
attempts to imitate speech are of the same class 
as described above. He gets more or less vivid 
images of the activity of other children or of 
adults. These images, by the very fact that they 
have been selected out of an infinite complex of 
images, indicate their affinity to certain impulses 
to action on the part of the child that are strug- 
gling for expression. It is only as he is about 

'For a valuable discussion on this line, see Stout's Manual 
of Psychology, chapter "Imitation," pp. 269-75, and particu- 
larly pp. 270, 271, 274, 275. 



122 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

to walk or to talk or to enter into a complex 
social organization that the walking and the talk- 
ing and the social conduct of others attract him 
and furnish images that help him define his own 
vague impulses. The child is seldom or never 
imitating from his own point of view, hut is 
always trying to straighten out some of his own 
ill-organized experiences. True imitation from 
the point of view of the imitator occurs only 
when, usually later in life, the actions of another 
are mocked for purposes of ridicule; and even 
in mocking it is likely that the imitation is for the 
purpose of increasing the mocker's consciousness 
of the ridiculous element itself. The doing of 
anything another has done renders one more 
vividly conscious of the character of the other's 
action — we get its value the better. 

Imitation does not thus describe any peculiar 
power in the child by which he is able to lay 
hold on social values. It is simply a term for 
describing from the social point of view what is 
characteristic of all its mental growth. As we 
have said, sociality is one of the functions of 
increasing complexity in activity. Imitation is 
a category that describes the process of increasing 
complexity from the standpoint of its sociality. 
We must always remember that it is a term for 
the observer only, otherwise we commit the "psy- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 123 

chological fallacy." It belongs exclusively on 
the side of the stimulus, and since, in a functional 
statement, we emphasize, not the stimulus, but 
the meaning, in the experience, of the act pro- 
duced by the stimulus, we seemingly have no 
place for imitation as such. We must ask of the 
imitative act : Does it mean merely copying to 
the child, or does it have a function in the defining 
of his experience? The latter is the view of 
functional psychology and is the truer one. 

Confusion of using imitation as a psychological 
term. — Imitation is not really a term to apply in 
psychology at all. That it is out of place comes 
out most clearly when we examine the attempts 
to subdivide the activity of the child into imita- 
tive, volitional, etc. To use these two terms is 
to confuse two different standpoints in describing 
a single process. To say that the volitional is, 
more or less remotely, the outgrowth of the imita- 
tive is to describe the child first from the stand- 
point of the observer and then from his own 
point of view. It is to describe the child on the 
social side first at a lower stage of socialization, 
and later on the individual side when his socializa- 
tion has become so complex as to be difficult to 
describe at all. If we start with imitation, we 
must in all consistency hold to it. There is no 
place where we can change off to an individual 



124 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

category like volition. Professor Baldwin's 
effort to reduce all mental activity to the imita- 
tive type is a perfectly consistent outcome of his 
starting with that type. Let us remember, how- 
ever, that all such descriptions are essentially 
external and do not, strictly speaking, belong to 
psychology. From the standpoint of individual 
experience all intelligent action is volitional ; from 
the point of view of society all is imitative. 

Professor Baldwin's theory in particular. — 
There are some details in Professor Baldwin's 
theory of imitation that we may now examine, 
since they tend to emphasize the necessity of the 
standpoint we have here indicated. He holds ^ 
that when a stimulus produces a motor response 
which tends to reproduce the stimulus, and 
through it the motor processes again, we have a 
case of imitation. He divides such activity into 
two classes, simple and persistent. By "simple 
imitation" he describes those reactions 

in which the movement does not really imitate, but is the 
best the child can do. He does not try to improve by 
making a second attempt. This is evidently a case of simple 
sensori-motor suggestion, and is peculiar psychologically 
only because of the more or less remote approximation the 
reaction has to the movement which the child copies. Real, 
or persistent, imitation, on the other hand, is the reaction 
that will reproduce the stimulating impression and so tend 

^Mental Development in the Child and the Race, p. 133. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 125 

to perpetuate itself. When a child strikes the combination 
required, he is never tired of working it. H. found endless 
delight in putting the rubber on a pencil and off again, 
each act being a new stimulus to the eye By persist- 
ent imitation [then] is meant the child's efifort by repetition 
to improve his imitations.^ 

Let us take a case recorded by Tracy in illus- 
tration of the above : 

A child eight and one-half months old, having seen his 
mother poke the fire, afterward crept to the hearth, seized 
the poker, thrust it into the ash pan, and poked it back and 
forth with great glee, chuckling to himself.^ 

According to Baldwin, here is a visual stimulus 
— the mother poking the fire, which produces in 
the child a motor response of poking the fire, 
which again gives the stimulus and through it the 
motor process of another poke, and so on and on. 
The criticism of this is that the response of the 
child to the copy does not reinstate the original 
stimulus. The first experience was purely a 
visual one; the motor response gives an experi- 
ence, partly visual, but very largely motor. 
Clearly the child does not reproduce the activity 
to get the stimulus again, for he does not get it; 
but rather to define, in his own experience, a 
certain complexity, hitherto relatively unfamiliar. 
What the child gets is not a reproduced stimulus, 

^Op. cit., pp. 132, 133. 
^Psychology of Childhood, p. 58. 



126 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

but a nezv experience. The act is repeated over 
and over again, because it is defining a previously 
vaguely realized experience. 

Baldwin's favorite description of imitation is 
that it is a circular process. As we have seen, it 
is circular only from the onlooker's point of view. 
To the child it is an evolving experience, li he 
were only getting over again the original experi- 
ence, the interest would soon flag, there would be 
little of the "endless delight" that without doubt 
does exist. What is a circular process to the 
observer has been very aptly termed a spiral pro- 
cess to the child. He neither gets the same 
stimulus that his "copy" has given him, nor do 
his successive acts in themselves repeat the experi- 
ence he gets from his first act. Each one is a little 
different from, a little higher than, the preceding 
one. Each one defines more definitely the impli- 
cations in the previous one. The emphasis of 
the child is never on the stimulus, but on the 
experience. Hence what Baldwin isolates as the 
typical or fundamental type of activity is really 
a description, from the observer's point of view, 
of one aspect of the larger process, namely, the 
effort of the child to define his experience. 

Having defined imitation in this external 
fashion — that is, in a way that bears no organic 
relation to the unfolding of experience — he finds 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 127 

himself under obligations to call all activity imita- 
tive that conforms to this external definition, 
regardless of the meaning or function of this 
activity within an experience. For example, he 
finds certain rhythmic activities in children, 
such as the v^alking alternation of legs, or the 
physiological rhythms of waste and repair, and 
concludes, since the process they represent is 
circular, they must also be of the imitative type! 
If he had defined his terms functionally, he would 
have been able to discriminate and avoid being 
forced, by a fancied external similarity, to class 
together such incongruous forms of action. 

Strictly speaking, all mental processes are of 
the spiral type. Each new act gathers up the 
values of previous experiences, reinstates them, 
so to speak, not to get them again, but to rise 
above them to a new reach of experience. How 
arbitrary it is, then, to call the child an imitator 
when the adult is regarded as relatively free. 
We have precisely the same type of activity in 
both, but the child gets the worst of it, because 
his activity is so simple that it can be forced into 
the external mold, while the adult, who is doing 
the same thing, that is, reinstating old values for 
the sake of new ones, is said to be voluntary, 
intellectual, independent. 

Professor Baldwin's rejection of simple imita- 



128 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

tion as an imperfect type of the process he is 
describing arises from the fact that it does not 
result in repeating the stimulus over and over 
again. Since he has made his definition of imita- 
tion hinge on the circular character of the process, 
simple imitation falls short, because it affords only- 
one circle of stimulus and response. But if we 
inquire into the meaning of the act to the child, 
it would seem that its function in a relatively 
unorganized consciousness is the same as that of 
"persistent imitation" in the better-developed 
mind. This "simple imitation," as Baldwin 
points out, illustrates how closely allied are imita- 
tion and suggestion. In fact, imitation is really 
a statement from the side of the observer of what 
suggestion is from the standpoint of the indi- 
vidual. In "simple imitation" we have at its 
lowest terms the power of the child to define his 
experience by the various stimuli gathered from 
his environment. In "persistent imitation" there 
is really nothing different, as far as imitation 
goes, from the simpler form, except that there is 
more of it. Here, as before, there is the taking 
up of a suggestion for the sake of its value in 
defining experience. 

The problem is in the persistence rather than 
in the imitation. — The really significant thing 
is not the imitation, but the persistence. All the 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 129 

meaning that "persistence" has in this connection 
arises from the fact that it has a functional 
significance as well as being a term, such as 
"imitation," for the observer. "Persistence" 
describes the personal attitude of the child toward 
the values realized about him. It is a personal, 
an individual category. From the standpoint of 
the observer, persistence is nothing but bare repe- 
tition or bare continuance. To describe any act, 
therefore, as a persistent imitation is to confuse 
an external category with a psychological one. 

Let us, however, note briefly the meaning and 
place of "persistence" as a psychological term. 
Recurring to the instance, mentioned by Professor 
Baldwin, of the taking off and putting on of the 
pencil rubber, we may note, first of all, that even 
to the onlooker the imitation has ceased after 
the first act. A certain sensori-motor experience 
has been gained, and the act is repeated, not 
because it reinstates the stimulus, for it does not 
do it, but because it reinstates the experience in 
more definite form. We do not have a circle of 
"sensor, motor; sensor, motor," nor of "reality 
image, movement; reality image, movement,"^ 
as Baldwin holds, but a succession of acts in 
which the emphasis shifts so that, externally, 
now sensation, now image, and now movement 

^Op. cit., p. 133. 



I30 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

seem to be uppermost, but in which, as far as 
the child is concerned, there are simply successive 
phases of a developing experience; not parts of 
an act, but complete acts at each successive point.-^ 
They succeed each other because there are still 
felt to be present in experience — values not yet 
fully realized. The persistence stands for that 
characteristic of experience that tends to reach 
out and appropriate whatever will define it. It 
is really unintelligible, in Baldwin's account, how 
imitation becomes persistent. Why does the 
child persistently imitate? We raise here a 
fundamental question as to the nature of experi- 
ence. Whether or not a child imitates is rela- 
tively a chance matter; it depends on the nature 
of his surroundings, their relation to him in his 
varying degrees of mental development. As a 
matter of fact, a good deal that the child and man 
do may be described externally as imitative. 
But whether there is imitation or not, we still 
have the persistence as the universal characteristic 
of all experience. Whether it is imitative or not 
depends on purely extraneous factors which can- 
not themselves be originally connected with the 
individual. The great problem is : JVhy is 
experience always reaching out, persistently try- 
ing to define itself more and more adequately? 

^Cf. Dewey, "The Reflex Arc Concept," Psychological 
Review, July, 1896. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 131 

Social and individual consciousness. — Before 
closing the chapter, we may say a word further 
in regard to the development of the social con- 
sciousness. We may repeat, what was affirmed 
at the first, that the process of mental develop- 
ment may be defined indifferently from the social 
or individual side. Every act that defines indi- 
viduality also defines the consciousness of others. 
There are no "special powers" by which the 
individual takes up social values. We may 
legitimately describe the process of the child's 
socialization by imitation, but, as we have pointed 
out, we are simply applying an ultra-individual 
term to exactly the same processes that we have 
described already from the standpoint of indi- 
vidual development. The final word is that 
everything that tends to individualise and define 
experience tends equally to socialize it. The two 
developments are absolutely correlative. 



CHAPTER XI 

MORAL IDEAS OF CHILDHOOD 

We turn now to examine a few special aspects 
of the more complex experience of childhood. 
The effort will be to try to get, in each case, the 
meaning of the child's attitudes in terms of his 
own mental organization. The foregoing dis- 
cussions of the development of experience in 
infancy will make us the better able to judge of 
its degree of development in childhood and youth. 

The problem of childhood morality. — By 
moral ideas is meant those ideas which arise with 
reference to the conventions of adult society, 
those regarding truth-telling, keeping of prom- 
ises, respect for rights and property of others. 
"Moral" is thus used in its original sense as the 
customary : the body of customs and institutions 
which has gradually grown up with society 
through the testing and sifting of centuries — 
these are the expression of social morality. The 
conduct and way of thinking of adults are largely 
governed by this social framework. But what 
shall we say of children? In one sense they 
have no moral ideas, at least in so far as they 
are unconscious of these social requirements. 
132 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 133 

But children do certain things in a more or 
less impulsive fashion — things that would have 
a moral significance if performed by an adult. 
Our problem is : How shall we regard such acts, 
and what sort of ideas concerning adult morality 
can children be said to possess? 

Moral status of the child. — There is no aspect 
of the child's development more likely to be mis- 
understood than this, and none on which it is 
more essential that the parent and teacher be 
informed. The theory one has on this matter 
affects very intimately the character of his treat- 
ment of boys and girls. It is not merely what 
they see others doing that affects their future 
attitudes; it is as much the sort of intercourse 
they have with others, the nature of the inter- 
action between themselves and their playmates 
and elders. It is needless to say that an inter- 
course in which the elder knows how to judge the 
child's attitudes aright will produce, in so far, a 
normal development in the child, while the failure 
to know what his acts mean to him can produce 
almost limitless distortions in his mental growth. 

There are two views commonly current as to 
the moral status of the baby and little child ; the 
one is that he is totally depraved, the other that 
he comes "trailing clouds of glory" after him. 
We might say that a third view, a combination 



134 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

of the two, is really the one ordinarily held, 
namely, that the baby is partly good and partly 
bad. But neither of these views has arisen 
through a psychological interpretation of child- 
life. They are essentially theological in their 
origin and meaning. The only correct procedure 
is to analyze carefully what the term "moral," 
or "being good or bad," involves, and then, by 
an examination of the form of the child's experi- 
ence, to determine in what sense he can be said 
to be moral or immoral. 

The moral attitude only an occasional one. — 
In adult society the term "moral" can be properly 
applied only under special circumstances, and its 
meaning varies with the circumstances. That is, 
it is not a term to be used unconditionally. What 
is moral with one person or at one time may not 
be in the case of another person or at another 
time. The primary cause of the relativity of 
the term "moral" is the fact that the fabric of 
society is always changing. The circumstances 
that induce moral change, or growth, that make 
a situation moral rather than non-moral, are of 
the same sort as those that produce intellectual 
growth. All such changes occur at certain crises 
within activity and with reference to the neces- 
sities for further action. Ordinarily we are non- 
moral. We perform our everyday duties in a 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 135 

direct, unquestioning fashion. Whatever we do 
in this way we cannot call either moral or im- 
moral. It is only when the doing of one of 
these things that we have not previously ques- 
tioned our right to do, comes into conflict with 
some recognized obligation to our family, friends, 
or society that we call a halt and examine 
more carefully the meaning of what we have 
before done with no special thought. What is 
its value, how must it be readjusted, or how must 
the previously recognized duty be readjusted so 
that there may be no conflict between them ? For 
instance, in society it is recognized that each indi- 
vidual has certain property rights. Perhaps I 
have been accustomed to keep lost articles of 
little value that I find in public places, without 
thinking anything in particular about it. Some- 
time I find a purse containing a large sum of 
money. Because of the amount and the possi- 
bility of discovering the owner, I realize for the 
first time I have no right to keep property so 
acquired. I may conclude to keep the purse, but, 
whether I do or not, the question as to its dis- 
posal, by its having come to consciousness, is 
thereby raised to the moral plane. 

Thus it is only at certain crises that even adults 
assume the moral attitude. These crises are 
those that bring us to consciousness of the organ- 



136 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

ization of our activity with reference to values 
that we recognize as of more vital consequence 
than those which are involved in the mere act 
of the moment. "Morality" is then clearly a 
relative term, depending on the system of values 
recognized at the time and upon the extent to 
which activity has been organized with reference 
to these fundamental values. 

The two characteristics of the moral attitude. — 
This digression should make two points clear that 
are quite fundamental to our appreciation of the 
child's moral status. For an individual to be on 
a moral plane, he must have, in the first place, 
some knowledge of an organization of values 
beyond his immediate activity, and, secondly, he 
should feel the relationship of his own act to this 
broader system. A man's or a child's morality 
does not depend upon the breadth of the values 
recognized, but on the degree to which they have 
been brought to bear on the particular acts. It 
matters not whether it results in the particular 
act's reorganizing the values rather than in its 
being reorganized by them. Even in such a case 
the particular act has acquired a new meaning. 
Even among the most cultured peoples there are 
many individual acts that have never been felt 
to be consistent with well-recognized social 
conventions. As long as they remain unevalu- 
ated they are simply non-moral. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 137 

The application to the child. — Turning now 
to the child, it is clear he cannot at first, nor even 
well-nigh to youth, have a comprehension of the 
meaning of the complex system of values recog- 
nized by society. He can learn their meaning 
only by meeting crises for himself and readjust- 
ing his direct and unreflective action to ever 
broader settings. Such a process necessitates 
years of growth mentally and abundant oppor- 
tunity for interaction with playmates and elders. 
Until he has thus grown into this complex life, 
its requirements must always seem external and, 
in a sense, imposed upon him. In consequence, 
there are two sets of problems as regards the 
morals of children. First : What is the attitude 
toward grown-up customs and moral regula- 
tions ? How is their activity modified by the fact 
of their living in the midst of a social order of 
whose values they are only dimly conscious, if at 
all, and yet to which they must to a certain extent 
conform ? Second : What are their own morals, 
what sort of ideas do they themselves have as to 
conduct? That is, what crises have they had to 
meet, and of what values can they properly be 
said to be conscious? As far as adult values are 
concerned, the child is non-moral ; and yet there 
are some of these values to which he should be 
led to conform his own action, even though they 



138 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

have little meaning to him. On his own plane 
of experience he has a limited moral code of his 
own, and the degree of his adjustments of action 
to these values that he has himself worked out 
may be counted his real morality. He sets up 
narrow standards for conduct, and within his 
limited environment he assigns to various persons 
certain places and functions. He is much more 
keenly alive to the maintenance of the relations 
he has conceived to exist than we often think. 
We know of a boy, between four and five years 
old, who has assigned to his father and mother 
certain functions each, and is much offended if 
they transgress. He sees little of his father 
during the day, and it seems a grave breach of 
propriety to him for his father to presume to 
reprove him, while he takes a reproof as a matter 
of course from his mother. This throws interest- 
ing light on the tendency of even young children 
to build up some sort of a system which they 
expect to be maintained. No doubt the first feel- 
ings analogous to moral ones arise when the child 
has the impulse himself to break, or sees others 
break, what has been fixed and habitual in the 
things that concern him most closely. 

Notwithstanding the beginnings of such a 
crude morality, the child's action is, in the main, 
direct and impulsive; that is, only slightly, if at 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 139 

all, evaluated with reference to any remote ends. 
They are the simple outgo of energy. As a baby, 
he kicks and scratches; when a little older he 
says cross things, tells stories, quarrels, sometimes 
takes what does not belong to him. In so far 
as these are direct responses to stimuli or the 
direct efforts to secure certain ends, they are non- 
moral. Little by little he comes to mediate these 
direct outputs of energy by some sort of dim 
recognition of more remote ends than those of the 
immediate act — ends which are yet, in some way, 
involved in it. 

This chapter is chiefly concerned with the first 
of the problems mentioned above. As is evident 
from what has immediately preceded, the answer 
to the second problem will vary greatly with each 
child, especially according to the degree in which 
his elders understand him on the first point. 
With some children there is no moral growth, 
nor even any morality, because of the atmosphere 
which adults throw about them. They are met 
at every turn by some dictum that simply 
says, "Do" or "Do not do this." The result is 
either blind submission or rebellion, never moral 
growth. They have not met and decided any- 
thing for themselves — the supreme condition of 
all moral development. 

Adult morality more or less external to the 



140 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

child. — The status of all children is, however, 
much the same as regards the attitude toward 
adult society. They are necessarily largely out- 
side its complex systems of conduct. Until they 
have learned their value, or meaning, by feeling 
the need of them in the actual processes of experi- 
ence, they seem arbitrarily imposed upon them, 
in so far as they come to their consciousness at all. 
A great many things that children do are to 
be interpreted as efforts to get some order and 
meaning into what must be largely the unintel- 
ligible usages of the adult. Language, the mean- 
ing of abstract terms in particular, is a matter 
that puzzles many little children. They make 
ceaseless efforts to understand many necessarily 
baffling words. Many of their reasonings remind 
one of the seemingly verbal difficulties in which 
the Greek philosophers were sometimes involved. 
But to the Greeks such problems were not purely 
verbal. They stood for honest efforts to define 
the exact meaning of vague terms. Like them 
the child is often confused in the midst of com- 
plex meanings and activities. Sometimes he tries 
to straighten things out in his limited fashion. 
Sometimes, perhaps generally, he ignores the 
complex regulations in the midst of which he 
lives and, in the most direct manner possible, 
seeks his own ends. An excellent illustration of 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 141 

the effort to clear up things was furnished by a 
little girl of four, who was perplexed over the 
meaning of the word "sometimes." She tried to 
solve her trouble thus : "Mamma, don't people 
die of fever sometimes?" *'Yes, dear." "I had 
the fever, didn't I, mamma?" "Yes." After a 
moment's thought: "But I didn't die, did I?" 
"No." "Then that wasn't sometime, was it, 
mamma?" This illustrates on the side of lan- 
guage what we are getting at on the side of 
morals. Here we find the best illustrations of 
our point in the child's attitude toward truth. 

Attitude of the child tozvard truth} — For the 
normal adult in modern society, within certain 
limits, truth is a part of his life. But for the 
child it is a thing to be manipulated, to be 
juggled. There are various devices by which he 
thinks he can escape the consequences of false- 
hoods. Every teacher is familiar with them. 
Some children think, if the left hand is placed on 
the right shoulder while telling falsehoods, the 
evil consequences of the untruth are avoided. 
Some think they are not bound by promises unless 
they accompany them with the words : "I may die 
if I don't." In certain portions of the Nether- 
lands no schoolboy dares break a promise which 

^For much in this and the following section I am indebted 
to Earl Barnes, especially for the illustrations. 



142 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

he has made while holding up his right thumb. 
This oath is inviolable. Who is not familiar 
with such expressions as "honor bright," "upon 
my word," etc., all of them evidences of the posi- 
tion we have taken that the adult attitude toward 
truth is foreign to the child? For him it is an 
external something whose obligations and con- 
sequences can be avoided by the use of certain 
signs and formulas. Of course, this attitude 
persists too often into adult years, but it is essen- 
tially an evidence of undeveloped intelligence. 
An ignorant man in taking an oath in court will 
sometimes attempt to kiss his thumb instead of 
the Bible, thinking, if his lips do not touch the 
sacred book, his oath will not be binding. 

I am indebted to Earl Barnes for the follow- 
ing, which illustrates well the various degrees in 
which a child feels that truth can be manipulated. 
A little boy suspected his sister of having his 
pocket-knife. When she answered his inquiry in 
the negative, he asked in return : "Honor 
bright?" "Honor bright," she replied promptly. 
"You may die if you do ?" With a trifle of hesi- 
tation she said : "Yes, I may die if I do." But 
the brother was not satisfied; there w^as a 
supreme test, and he applied it. "Crook your 
little finger," he said, "and say, 'The worms may 
eat me if I die, if I have your knife.'" This was 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 143 

too much, and putting her hand in her pocket 
she drew it forth, saying : "Here, take your old 
knife." 

Attitude toward deception. — Closely linked 
with this attitude toward truth is a curious 
delight most children have in deception of some 
kind. The tendency to deceive seems to be char- 
acteristic of all low-grade or undeveloped minds. 
Stating it functionally, we may say it is the way 
a relatively unorganized mind reacts in the midst 
of forces it fails to comprehend, or which it feels 
it is unable to cope with directly, whether these 
forces are those of a highly organized social situa- 
tion, as with the child, or those of nature and 
opposing tribes, as with the savage. This is one 
aspect of the attitude that shows itself in myth- 
making. The child, being still outside the great 
organization of society and not understanding 
its requirements or conventions, feels, however, 
the impulse to make some sort of adjustment to 
them. His own narrow world of values and 
necessary lines of action is the center from which, 
and with reference to which, his reactions are 
adjusted. Of the world's way of doing things 
he knows nothing. Only by experience will he 
learn the meaning of truth and its value in 
accomplishing his ends. He realizes only his 
end, and sets about accomplishing it by manipu- 



144 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

lating the bits of social force that he finds within 
his reach in a fashion such as to bring results as 
quickly as possible. How is he to know when 
his methods are illegitimate? We may explain 
thus much of the deception practiced by children, 
but not all. There is much of it that is purely 
play, the free interaction of vivid imagery with a 
simple sense-content. So also with children's 
lies; some of them are the unreflective efforts of 
low-grade minds to get control of forces that they 
cannot meet directly. Others are solely the result 
of the child's getting his images confused with 
the reality of sensation. 

It is manifestly incorrect to call a misrepre- 
sentation due to vividness of imagery a falsehood. 
The child thinks he is telling the truth. What 
he says has the same meaning in his life as does 
truth to the adult. He simply has not learned 
to distinguish between the real and the ideal 
worlds. 

As regards the great mass of real deception 
practiced by children, we must judge it by its 
meaning to the child and not by its conformity 
to adult standards. We must always judge the 
child from the standpoint of his undeveloped 
sense of adult values. If he is untruthful, deceit- 
ful, or predatory in his habits, this conduct, we 
may be sure, simply cannot mean the same thing 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 145 

with his degree of mental organization that it 
would necessarily mean in a mature experience. 
We are not advocating that the child be unre- 
strained in such action, but rather, before holding 
him culpable, we should try to find the situations 
into which he has been thrown that have fur- 
nished stimuli for such conduct. Normally, the 
child's methods of reaching ends will not be far 
different from those employed by his associates 
and elders. If, in the midst of presumably good 
surroundings, he uses illegitimate means to 
satisfy his wants, it is because the proper expres- 
sion of his impulses is denied him, or because he 
has been repeatedly misunderstood in what he 
had intended rightly and by punishment is made 
all the more vividly conscious of it; the very 
emphasis of the inhibition makes him act in 
the forbidden manner again. Many a child 
is confirmed in story-telling and disobedience 
because his direct, unevaluated action is inter- 
preted as untruthful or as refractory by adults. 
Merely to approach a child in such a manner is 
to make him conscious of his act as something 
bad, he knows not what; and when it is repeated, 
as it surely will be, it is with a meaning it did not 
originally have to him. Thus a thoughtless 
imitation, a direct expression of impulse, is forced 
into the child's consciousness with a sense of 



146 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

the opprobrium that it has for the adult, but with 
none of the meaning. He repeats it with the 
interpretation of it he has received from his elders 
and, in a sense, identifies himself with it. 

The impulse toward "had language." — The 
child is constantly picking up and "trying on" 
all sorts of expressions absolutely meaningless to 
him. We may take as a general law that it is 
important for an undeveloped mind to be suscep- 
tible to every feature of the environment that is 
in any way connected with the growth it is then 
making. It is, then, easy to see that the little 
child, in the years when his language is develop- 
ing most rapidly, should be almost abnormally 
susceptible to new and striking expressions. H 
the expression fits, if it attracts the attention of 
others, it comes to the front in consciousness and 
is sure to be repeated. If it is ignored by his elders 
or playmates, it never comes to the focus of atten- 
tion and probably is permanently dropped. A 
three-year-old boy in a refined family was once 
trying to tell his mother and sisters about some- 
thing, but they being busy did not pay attention 
to him and several times asked him to repeat his 
story. Finally he cried out impatiently : "Go 

to ! Do you hear that?" He had found 

the expression no one knew where, and as no one 
paid the least attention to it, he never said it 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 147 

again. If he had been scolded "for using such 
naughty words," he would probably have been 
out with it again at the next appropriate moment. 

This does not account for the acquiring of 
"bad language" in later childhood. Here it 
is not an unconscious repetition of meaningless 
expressions, but an attempt to define the experi- 
ence by the vigorous and striking words used by 
others. The child feels the force of the language 
and seeks to get its value into his experience. 
Even here there would be no sense of badness, 
were it not for his being made conscious of its 
significance by the reproofs of his superiors. 

Summary. — The upshot of our discussion is 
something like this : The child is born into a 
complex social order, of whose values he can have 
no consciousness until he has lived among them 
and felt their need in the growth of his own 
experience. We are interested to learn accu- 
rately, however, how the child reacts in the midst 
of these superimposed and external values, that 
we may be the better able to help in a normal, 
symmetrical development of his experience. One 
of the functions of the teacher is to help bridge 
over the gap that exists between the child and the 
requirements of society — requirements that he is 
conscious of, not as unrealized values, but only 
as external impositions. 



148 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

Must the sense of disparity be emphasized? — 
We have thus far endeavored to get a clear con- 
ception of the sort of conduct which the child's 
sense of the disparity between himself and others 
produces. We have not raised the question as to 
how far it is best, or normal, for the sense of it 
to exist at all. How far should the difference 
between himself and society be impressed upon 
him? How far should he be dogmatically com- 
manded to do so and so, thus being made to feel 
acutely the arbitrariness for himself of social 
regulations? Some people would answer, by 
their action at least, that he should be made to 
feel the difference at every turn. Their every 
attitude toward children is that of dogmatic 
superiority. On the other hand, a child can 
scarcely avoid feeling the difference sometimes 
at least. Without any effort on the part of his 
elders, he is too often painfully conscious of the 
inadequacy of the means he uses to the ends he 
realizes. Not a little of the "immorality," so- 
called, between six and ten is no doubt due to the 
effort on the part of boys and girls to emphasize 
a feeling of adequacy to their surroundings in 
which they really feel themselves deficient. At 
the beginnings of adolescence, at any rate, the 
youth does many things, acquires many attitudes 
of bearing and voice, that help conceal to himself 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 149 

his realized deficiencies of adjustment to things 
and people. The boastful, overbearing manner 
of children at this age is to be partly attributed 
to the half-instinctive effort to conceal their really 
felt deficiencies by a bold front. 

The periods into which the child's life may be 
divided with reference to moral values are 
roughly as follows : ( i ) The impulsive stage, 
up to the age of six or seven. By "impulsive" 
we mean the same kind of action that we did 
when we described the infant's first movements, 
but here with reference to a different system. 
Then his movements were impulsive in that they 
were not co-ordinated to perform even the sim- 
plest forms of action. He is impulsive now in 
that his activities are direct and unco-ordinated 
with reference to an organization of activity as 
a whole. (2) The stage in which there is some 
sense of this broader organization of action, but 
little or no comprehension of its meaning. Hence 
all regulations, especially moral ones, are felt as 
more or less arbitrary and unnatural — a system 
to be avoided or manipulated in so far as it 
obtrudes itself upon him. This stage extends 
from about seven to just before the beginnings 
of puberty. (3) The stage immediately preced- 
ing adolescence, in which individual duties and 
responsibilities become prominent. The child 



150 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

begins to have clearer ideas within his own narrow 
sphere. That is, the first differentiations of con- 
duct are appearing in that he is becoming 
conscious in the sphere of his daily life of the 
meaning and necessity of the social conventions. 
(4) The fourth stage of the child's morality 
begins with adolescence, when he comes to be 
definitely conscious of himself as a part of the 
community and realizes its conventions as a part 
of his organized system of action. 

Childish cruelty. — A discussion of the morals 
of childhood would hardly be complete without 
at least a reference to a common tendency in 
children to be cruel. The time when animals are 
most likely to be abused and when the rights of 
others are disregarded is in many children 
between the ages of eight and twelve. We may 
account for this in a general way, as some other 
phenomena above have been accounted for, by 
regarding it as one aspect of the effort the child 
in these years puts forth most vigorously to get 
control of the objects of his environment. This 
will be discussed more in detail in the chapters 
on "Interests." Granted that the child here comes 
to consciousness for the first time of the complex 
world of objects that are to be manipulated in 
various ways, and at the same time feels his 
inadequacy to do what he would like to with 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 151 

them, it is quite conceivable that he should try 
to express his craving for mastery by harshness 
to animals. Primarily his desire is not so much 
to produce suffering in others as to get a vivid 
sense of his ability to control them, to do what he 
wants to do to them. The fact that the satisfac- 
tion of this craving may result in actual cruelty 
is due to several characteristics of an experience 
of an imperfect degree of organization. Earl 
Barnes has summed them up in an admirable 
manner, and we can do no better than to avail 
ourselves of his suggestions.^ The narrow per- 
sonality of the child is necessarily unable to enter 
very largely into the feelings of others, hence it 
is easy for the child to disregard others' pain. 
This is due partly to "ignorance or inexperience, 
which produces pain without knowing it." Lack 
of a well-organized experience, with none of the 
dominant, centering tendencies of the adult, leads 
to spasmodic action, in which there is little fore- 
sight of consequences. Coupled with these char- 
acteristics is "a love of activity and excitement, 
a hunger for sensations which makes the child do 
things regardless of others." We must also take 
into account a special manifestation of the above, 
namely, "curiosity and experiment which blunts 

^Syllabus of a Course of Six Lectures on The Development 
of the Moral Nature, Lecture IV. American Society for 
Extension of University Teaching, Philadelphia, Pa. 



152 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

sympathy with the pain caused." Children also 
have a keen sense of "dislike for excessive indi- 
vidual variants leading to ridicule and the inflic- 
tion of other forms of subjective pain." 

Emotions in general. — As neither time nor 
materials are available for a separate chapter on 
the emotional development after infancy, especi- 
ally on the aesthetic side, we may conclude this 
chapter with a few general statements as to the 
nature of the problem. All emotional experience, 
as we pointed out in the chapter dealing with the 
earliest emotional life, presupposes a certain 
development of consciousness. This is particu- 
larly true of the subtler types of emotion. The 
little child may react with pleasure toward 
aesthetic objects and convey the impression that 
he appreciates the values involved, but the real 
point of interest is usually one of minor aesthetic 
importance. The child is apt to be attracted by 
the coloring of a picture or by some detail that 
suggests a familiar object. 

In tests made on school children by O'Shea,^ 
it was found that colored pictures were always 
preferred to black-and-white ones of the same sub- 
jects, and that familiar objects such as cats, 
dogs, babies, etc., in pictures always excited much 
pleasure. The chief means of arousing the 

^"Interests in Childhood," Child-Study Monthly, Vol. II, 
p. 266. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 153 

aesthetic emotions in the adult are remote rather 
than immediate. A sHght suggestion is given 
in the picture that, by association, calls up things 
too deep for utterance, the sublimation of years 
of experience and struggle. The deepest emo- 
tional effects center about the fundamental in- 
stinct of love in its various forms. This, except 
in its simplest aspects, is practically in another 
world than the child's. In general we may say, 
then, that the subtler emotions, as well as the 
moral sense, are not something given independ- 
ently of growth, but, if present, imply a concomi- 
tant experience of great maturity and complexity. 



CHAPTER XII 

THEORY OF INTERESTS 

Necessity of a comparative study of interests. 
— A great deal of effort has been expended during 
the last few years by students of child-psychology 
to find out as accurately as possible the lines along 
which children's interests develop. No one, 
however, has as yet gathered up the material thus 
afforded in order to see what it gives us as a 
whole. A comparative study of the material, as it 
at present stands, is a logical demand, not only 
that we may get the additional enlightenment that 
always comes by the combination of hitherto 
isolated facts, but, as well, that the various 
"results" may check each other, and that there 
may be a comparison and evaluation of the meth- 
ods of various students. 

The purpose in the following chapters is to 
make such a comparative study. We shall 
attempt first to state as clearly as possible the 
nature of the problem of children's interests, and 
then to gather together the results of the various 
investigators of particular phases of the problem, 
that we may see, if possible, in them some cen- 
tralizing principle that will unify and make more 
154 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 155 

intelligible and effective these results, and sug- 
gest, perhaps, lines for further and more system- 
atic study. 

General nature of interest. — By interests we 
usually understand something very closely con- 
nected with one's free and spontaneous activities. 
They are not something existing per se, added 
to the main current of the life, perhaps as a fringe 
or adornment, but rather the very life itself, in 
so far as it is an outgrowth and expression of 
the individual himself. The interests are the 
personal side of the activity that affords more 
or less of self-expression. Genetically, the activi- 
ties are probably the primary elements, while 
the interests, as feelings, are the later, conscious 
evaluation of the activities. For example, it is 
doubtful whether the activity of the newly born 
babe in getting food is sufficiently conscious to be 
called interesting to the actor. But as self- 
consciousness grows, the activities that before 
occurred reflexly or instinctively begin to have 
their self-evaluation. The problem of interests 
is thus closely connected with that of activity. 
A child's activities are the only index by which 
we can really judge of his interests. 

For our study we need only note that interest 
may be taken to mean the mere feeling accom- 
panying a certain sort of an act, or, more 



156 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

broadly, as practically synonymous with the acti- 
vities themselves; or, still further, as the organ- 
ized disposition from which various lines of 
action flow. These different applications of the 
term do not imply different psychic phenomena, 
but are rather descriptions of the same subject- 
matter from successively broader points of view. 
Just as the particular act has its self-side, its 
feeling of "my-own-ness," so an organized series 
of activities in the very fact of their organization 
imply an organized disposition of which they are 
the expression. This organized disposition is 
the "self-side" of the series of acts in the same 
sense in which interest in the narrower sense is 
the personal evaluation of the single act.^ 

The question of origin. — The preliminary 
questions for us tp consider regarding children's 
interests in this broader sense are those regard- 
ing their origin and the extent to which they are 
modified or produced by the processes of growth, 
by environment, and by heredity. The light we 
get on the question of origins will determine very 
largely our attitude toward the specific interests 
themselves. The presence in the child of certain 
tendencies to particular kinds of activity has been 
the subject of so many sweeping generalizations 

^For a full discussion of the psychology of interest see 
Dewey, "Interest as Related to Will," Second Supplement to 
the Herbart Yearbook for 1895. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 157 

that it is worth while to analyze the whole subject 
and see what we can really say about it and what 
we cannot. A great many of the tendencies to 
action that we shall have to consider are usually 
accounted for in a vague and useless fashion by 
being described as recapitulations from early race- 
history. We shall attempt to state them in terms 
connected with the immediate life-processes of 
the child itself. If such a statement is possible, 
it will certainly be more illuminating than one 
in which the emphasis is largely on the past. 

The culture-epoch theory — a criticism. — It is 
popular to pick out certain activities in various 
periods of childhood, such as those centering in 
predatory organizations or in animals, or those 
calculated to deceive others, and so on, and to 
regard them as chiefly significant in their refer- 
ence backwards to lower stages of culture. They 
are seldom regarded as having any functional 
or organic connection with the present. In other 
words, in a child of a given age, certain activities 
are singled out as having recapitulative signifi- 
cance, while there is left over a lot of other 
activity, and that usually by far the largest part 
of his daily life, that is accorded no such distinc- 
tion. It comprises just the ordinary direct reac- 
tions of the growing child to his everyday 
surroundings. 



158 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

May not such a separation of the child's hfe 
into radically different elements be due to a mis- 
conception of the meaning of recapitulation? 
Cannot the activities of a given period of child- 
hood be so formulated that they can all be 
described under one category? 

The present attitude as regards recapitulation 
of race-characteristics is largely due to the form 
in M^hich the facts themselves have been presented 
to us, that is, as evidence for the theory of evolu- 
tion. As such their emphasis is necessarily on 
the past. The way in vv^hich such facts are 
supposed to support the doctrine of evolution is 
that they appear in intermediate stages in the 
individual's development, and seem to have no 
meaning unless we suppose that the higher organ- 
ism of today has evolved from a lower form. 
This is especially true as regards the biological 
side, and the same attitude has been carried over 
into the psychic sphere. Every writer on evolu- 
tion has laid special emphasis on the meaningless 
character of many of the stages in the develop- 
ment of the individual physical organism, and 
pointed out various vestigial or rudimentary 
organs, all of which, it is maintained, could not 
be accounted for except as remnants of lower 
stages of existence in ancestors. That the indi- 
vidual passes through certain biologic stages 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 159 

should be regarded, not as proof of an evolution 
from a lower form, but rather as evidence as to 
what the course of evolution has been, once 
granted that it is a fact. This statement may be 
a startling one. We maintain, however, that the 
true and primary significance of intermediate 
stages in the development of the individual must 
be sought first of all in the individual himself. 
Their backward reference is purely an inferential 
one, resting for its validity on a hypothesis that 
must first be proved in another way. The inter- 
mediate stages are not so much red tape that 
must be wound off before the adult form can be 
perfected, simply because the ancestors did so 
and so. The undeveloped organism is not 
weighted down with an incubus from the past 
that must be carried and religiously regarded, 
because, and only because, the past was such and 
such. Whatever the importance of the reference 
to the past — and it is important — this reference 
by no means exhausts the significance of the 
activity or stage of development. Those who 
maintain the popular view always insist, of 
course, that the intermediate stages are absolutely 
essential to well-rounded maturity, but they hold 
this view from the fact that the race has passed 
through similar stages, rather than from the fact 
that they have any functional significance in the 



i6o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

developing organism itself. It is not assumed 
for an instant that a mammalian embryo could 
mature without at some time having gill slits, 
but it is forgotten that the gill slits may have a 
perfectly legitimate and necessary function to per- 
form, entirely aside from the fact that certain 
remote ancestors of the mammal possibly had 
gill slits when mature. 

As a case of useless recapitulation, Darwin 
mentions the embryonic stage of the land-newt, 
in which it is found as a tadpole in the intra- 
uterine fluid, pointing back to a time when the 
land-newt's ancestors lived in the water, and the 
period now passed within the uterus was then 
spent as by the progeny of the water-newt at 
present.^ Even here it is questionable to just 
what extent we have a right to call this a mere 
reference to the past. It is by all means prob- 
able that this and most other seemingly useless 
stages of development are absolutely essential to 
the perfecting of the mature organism. The 
developing organism is not merely sidetracked 
into going through intermediate stages in order 
eventually to attain maturity, if by happy chance it 
lives long enough to get on the main line again; 
rather each and every intermediate step is a 

^Origin of Species (Appleton edition, 1893), Vol. II, 
p. 256. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT i6i 

definite and efficient cause in bringing to pass the 
mature organism with its own pecuhar char- 
acteristics. 

It is true there may be remnants of physical 
structure, activities, and attitudes in the undevel- 
oped or even mature organism that have no 
present functional significance; but, if so, they 
must be comparatively trivial or transient. The 
inheritance of every ancestral attitude, activity, 
or structure would of course soon give the new 
organism so great a load to carry that it would 
never have an opportunity to face life for itself. 
Its whole life would be spent in recapitulating. 
Naturally, the most important thing that any 
organism has to do is to make the right reactions 
toward its environment. Hence those activities 
and forms of physical structure that are most 
essential to meeting the present problems of 
growth w^ill be speedily selected out of the indefi- 
nitely larger mass to which the organism falls 
heir. The organisms able to select the essential 
elements and to slur over the nonessential will 
have the best showing, other things being equal, 
in the struggle for existence. Whatever non- 
essentials do survive must be such as in no wise 
seriously to interfere with the fulfilment of the 
vital functions. Thus may we account for the 
persistence of the vermiform appendix; the upper 



i62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

front teeth in the embryonic calf ;^ the fright of 
young children at fur, if such is really the case, 
or their fear of domestic pets, etc. In these and 
perhaps a considerable number of other caseS; if 
the elements in question have no functional value, 
their persistence can be accounted for only on the 
ground that their presence is of little or no con- 
sequence in the life-processes of the organism. 
It may be assumed that the more complicated the 
processes are in which the organism is involved, 
the more the unnecessary elements will be 
crowded aside. These statements may be taken 
as applying in the psychical as well as in the 
biological sphere. We may consider it, there- 
fore, safe to assume that by far the majority of 
the activities and attitudes of children are of 
definite functional value in their development. 

The really illuminating category, then, under 
which to describe the child's activities, and one 
which includes them all on an equal basis, is that 
of present function. Their backward reference 
to the life of a remote ancestry is of far less 
moment to the educator than the fact that they 
are essentially the manifestation of a developing 
psycho-physical organism, and that in some way 
they make possible the activities of later stages 
and in the end condition the adequate perform- 

^Ibid., p. 255. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 163 

ance of the functions of maturity. From this 
standpoint it becomes of even greater importance 
than before to know accurately from a study of 
children themselves just what we can call func- 
tions and activities of an immature mind. We 
do not mean to say that the study of the backward 
reference in the child's life is not necessary, but 
that the value of such a study for the teacher 
consists solely in applying it to the elucida- 
tion of its significance in the child's present 
experience. The question then is : What are the 
activities that characterize an undeveloped or im- 
mature mind and body, and in what way do they 
condition later and more adequate reactions? 

The deeper question as to the nature of the 
unity underlying every process of development, 
the nature of the connection of the past with 
the future in any given stage, we shall not here 
attempt to consider. In a sense it is true that 
no activity can be stated entirely with reference to 
the present status of the organism; but this 
question belongs to philosophy, and we are here 
concerned only with stating, as carefully as pos- 
sible, certain psychological and biological facts. 

Two other factors in the determination of the 
child's activities require a brief consideration; 
those, namely, of environment and immediate 
heredity. As for environment, we may regard 



i64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

it as restrictive and modificatory rather than 
determinative of these organized dispositions to 
action that we find to be characteristic of child- 
hood. The specific things done may be largely 
due to outer factors, but the attitude of the doer 
and the meaning of the act to him must be pre- 
eminently of inner rather than outer origin. In 
maturity it matters not for us which predomi- 
nates, but the necessities of development make 
the inner unfolding of supreme importance in 
childhood. 

As for the part played by heredity in deter- 
mining interests and activities, the following con- 
siderations furnish at least a good working 
hypothesis : With heredity we approach what 
we may call an individualizing factor. Through 
the child's kinship to the race are first laid down 
the great fundamental lines of character from 
which the individual emerges. In the very 
immature organism the individual elements lie 
relatively in the background. But as maturity 
is approached, the lines of individuality begin 
to stand out and hereditary tendencies are most 
likely to assert themselves. By heredity in this 
narrow sense we have the carrying over into the 
descendant of the individuality of an ancestor, 
in some specific feature of body or trait of mind. 
The inherited element may have no functional 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 165 

significance. We have seen that it is otherwise 
in race-heredity. There it would simply be 
impossible for the irrelevant elements to survive, 
so great would be their number. But in family- 
heredity the time is too short for the weeding 
out of useless elements to have gone very far, and 
still less has the time sufficed for the extinction 
of any strongly marked but harmful characteristic. 
A certain boy, for example, was observed to use 
a peculiar motion in putting a hat on his head. 
No one about him put his hat on so. At length 
the mother recognized in the boy's movement the 
identical one of his grandfather under similar 
circumstances. The boy was too young when 
his grandfather died to have copied this curious 
habit. It was simply a direct carrying over of 
a trait from an immediate ancestor, and it came 
to the surface and persisted partly because it 
stood so completely outside the vital processes 
of growth and partly because there had not been 
time to crowd it out. It is thus with a multitude 
of other physical and psychic traits. 

Fundamental lines eniphasij:ed at first. — These 
individualizing elements, then, are relatively 
crowded into the background, at first, by the more 
fundamental requirements of organic develop- 
ment. In the early years children approach more 
nearly to a common type. The embryonic child 



i66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

can hardly be said to have individuahty. It is 
only after the more fundamental lines are laid 
that his individuality begins to appear. Only 
later does he begin to be afifected in individual 
ways, instead of in general ones, by his environ- 
ment, and to react as himself upon it, and later 
still to show forth his hereditary traits and 
taints. 

We may with considerable certainty say that 
the environment determines the most fundamental 
traits of individuality in the immature form, 
while in the mature other factors enter — the indi- 
viduality of immediate ancestors and the disposi- 
tions that have resulted from the processes of 
growth in the given environment ; in other words, 
the race-dispositions as modified by education. 

As there is less individuality in the first reac- 
tions, so there is less in the first interests, and we 
can, therefore, with some assurance draw con- 
clusions as to the great lines of interest that 
run through the lives of most children, for as 
immature organisms they will have more in com- 
mon than otherwise. 

Interest and control. — We turn now to the 
more immediate problems of interests. If inter- 
ests are indicative of the functions of the develop- 
ing organism, we may conveniently find the pro- 
cess of growing control — a good one about which 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 167 

to centralize the material we collect. The process 
of development is pre-eminently one in broaden- 
ing and deepening the control of elements internal 
and external. We can hardly, then, find any 
more illuminating point of view from which to 
regard interests. Many of their peculiarities 
in certain periods are due to the child's having 
suddenly advanced to the possibility or the neces- 
sity of a broader control and the difficulty of 
getting adjusted to its demands; or perhaps 
the impulse to realize the meaning of the new 
power more adequately comes as a vague stimu- 
lus to all sorts of seemingly erratic activities. 
The cruelty of many children, at certain periods, 
to the animals within their power may often find 
its explanation here. 

We may note first in a general way the pro- 
cesses of unfolding activity, and hence of unfold- 
ing interests. The first efforts of the child un- 
doubtedly center in gaining control of the sense- 
organs and various fundamental motor co-ordina- 
tions. Through the instrumentality of these an 
ever wider range of activities is rendered possible 
and an ever wider range of interests is organized 
for further activity. As the consciousness of self 
emerges from the early and chaotic experiences, 
so also does the social world differentiate. Along 
with increased power to control movement comes 



i68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

a co-ordinate increase in appreciation of social 
values. As the number of sensory and motor 
adjustments increase in complexity, there is of 
necessity an increase in mediating mental pro- 
cesses. These mediating processes furnish the 
basis for vastly more numerous lines of interest 
and vastly more complex ones. Instead of rest- 
ing only on the immediate output of energy, as 
in the earliest interests, they now find their sup- 
port in indirect activities and complex mental 
processes, involving more or less remote or ideal 
reference. The whole process is a passage from 
a relatively narrow environment with undefined 
social values to a broader one with more and 
more consciously evaluated social ideas. When 
we take into account in this widening process 
the influence of growth itself and its periods of 
acceleration and retardation; also such physio- 
logical processes as the shedding of the milk 
teeth, the beginnings of sexual maturity, we have 
a good general basis on which to interpret the 
interests of the child. 

Classifications of interests. — The following are 
some of the classifications of interests : Dawson 
in an article on "Children's Interest in the 
Bible"^ classifies them in the order of their 
development, as follQws: instinctive, sensori- 

^Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VII, p. 151. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 169 

motor and intellectual-emotional, or associational 
and rational. Another classification, covering 
the same ground, but throwing it in a little differ- 
ent light, might be made thus : regarding interest 
as the internal aspect of self-expressive activity, 
the first interests center around immediate activ- 
ity, i. e., biological functions as they come to 
consciousness. Interests follow that are only 
indirectly connected with any one activity, but 
accompany rather the complex functioning of the 
entire life-process. For example, the little child 
enjoys a game because it furnishes a direct out- 
let for his active impulses. A boy or girl a little 
older is interested in geography or arithmetic 
because these subjects afford opportunities for 
successful mental activity. The mere successful 
play of the physical or psychic organism is regis- 
tered internally in terms of interest. If we now 
turn to children a little older, we find their center 
of interest in the game lies, not in the mere 
successful play of bodily muscles, but rather in 
the winning of the game. The interest is trans- 
ferred from the actual putting forth of energy 
to the anticipated end. At the same time, they 
will begin to enjoy arithmetic, not because it 
affords opportunity for the successful putting 
forth of effort, but because of its evident connec- 
tion with future livelihood and adult success. 



170 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

While the two sorts of classification given 
above may seem to differ but slightly, the latter 
is really more practically available than the for- 
mer. No very definite description of interests 
can be made solely on the basis of mental or 
psychic content. A certain variety of psychic 
content may be more in evidence in some inter- 
ests than in others, but, at most, such descrip- 
tions can be only rough-and-ready ones. If, in- 
stead of attempting a description on the side 
of content, we note the function fulfilled by the 
interest, or organized disposition to certain activ- 
ity, we have an objective criterion that can be 
applied to even slight details with some degree 
of assurance. All interests, then, shall be con- 
sidered as functional elements in the process by 
which the child's control broadens and deepens, 
and his personality is correspondingly enriched. 

We are now ready to see what the literature of 
the subject can furnish us for working out the 
child's development from this standpoint. We 
shall try to find light on the definite periods of 
unfolding in certain directions, if such really 
occurs. We shall try to trace out in the appar- 
ently heterogeneous manifestations of child- 
energy an increasing efficiency in making adjust- 
ments to successively larger environments, and, 
on the other side, the increasing definition of his 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 171 

individuality through the increasing adequacy of 
the interaction of internal and external elements. 
Stated more briefly, we shall try, as far as the 
material afforded permits, to trace the develop- 
ment of more and more adequate control through 
the organization and mediation of the child's 
primitive impulse to action. 



CHAPTER XIII 

DEVELOPMENT OF INTERESTS 

Interests of the first period of childhood. — 
There is a general agreement of all investigators 
to make the first important period of childhood 
after early infancy include the years between two 
and a half and about six or seven.* 

The characterizations of this period in the 
main agree. It is distinctly a play period. The 
child at the beginning emerges definitely into a 
world of things and activities as opposed to mere 
sensations. The wholes with which the child 
deals are at first emotional ones, that is, unities 
that are not connected with one another for fur- 
ther activity, but rather are complete in them- 
selves. The child has not learned to see in the 
object any reference to more than the immediate 
activity, which when suggested by the object or 
the image is performed at once. In any given 
experience the child himself, the object, and the 
activity are more or less fused into a single 
emotional whole. The differentiated image 
has not yet had time to appear. The only 

^Cf. A. F. Chamberlain, The Child, etc., chap, iv, "The 
Periods of Childhood." 

172 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 173 

images, as yet, are the summations of the value 
of all the activities that cluster about his con- 
tact with certain objects important in his 
environment. In time certain sensory elements 
stand out as the significant ones, as the signs by 
which the object comes to be known. With the 
growth of an image abstracted from the activity 
comes the possibility of play as distinct from 
mere impulsive expenditure of energy. Play is 
the interaction of the presented sense-content with 
the image-content of the mind. As at the very 
first, so now, mere activity is of the most absorb- 
ing interest. Objects, even yet, are less real to 
the child than are the activities that they suggest. 
In addition to their being the stimuli to direct 
activity, they tend more and more to excite chains 
of imagery which renders the activity itself richer. 
This soon becomes a questioning age,^ the 
beginning of an interest in the relations of 
images. The strongest interests are in the real 
experiences of the immediate world, but so 
anxious is the child to connect and relate his 
experiences that it is easy to turn him off into 
the fantastical and unreal by checking his expres- 
sion of the real world. Much of the so-called 
interest in myth and fairy-tale can be explained 

^SuLLY, Studies of Childhood, p. 75, "The Questioning 
Age." 



174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

in this fashion as induced phenomena, and not 
necessarily the normal expression of the growing 
child. We cannot believe in any innate delight 
in regarding things as other than they actually 
present themselves, except as it is an aspect of the 
attempt of an immature organism to gain more 
adequate control over the situations in which it 
is acting. The child is interested in the myth 
in so far as it helps him to get at the values 
within which he vaguely feels himself to be mov- 
ing. He will construct his own myths for exactly 
the same purpose. To him they are not pretense, 
but better ways of getting at things. His myth- 
making instinct is not a result of his savage an- 
cestry, but of the fact that he has an undeveloped 
mind, and undeveloped minds have pretty definite 
ways of reacting the world over, whether their 
possessors be children or savages. 

Imitation plays an important part in the inter- 
ests of this period. The more complete activities 
of older people help in defining the child's images, 
and the mere definition of the image means the 
attempt to carry it out overtly. This is above all 
the time for mimic plays or reproductions of all 
sorts of simple social activities. 

Disparity of image and reality. — With the 
more definite working out of the images the con- 
sciousness of the disparity of image and activity 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 175 

grows. This is apt to arouse two very different 
sorts of interest in the objective world. In one 
case depression is caused by this disparity. The 
consciousness of his inabihty to realize his images 
inhibits all activity. Interest in everything is lost, 
and the child settles down to take the humdrum 
world as it is. Nothing can be more unfortunate 
for the future of the child than this early ennui. 
The opposite type of child realizes the disparity 
as keenly, but offsets it by an ideal world of his 
own construction, within which he realizes him- 
self completely. Both attitudes are unfortunate, 
and yet few children escape one or the other in 
this transition period. 

A fair degree of control in a narrow sphere is 
attained by the normal child in the first four 
or five years. That is, he is master of a good 
many motor reactions and sense-adjustments. 
He understands a good many simple duties in his 
home. If he has had wise training, he is well 
adjusted to the requirements of the social group 
within which he moves. But about the age of six 
or seven the consciousness of a broader field is 
thrust upon him, a field to which he is not yet 
adjusted. He may be said to have reached the 
first culmination in the development of his psycho- 
physical co-ordinations. He is master only of the 
larger bodily movements. The finer adjustments 



176 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

that make possible a complete interaction with 
the minute details of the environment are not 
yet acquired. It appears that interest depends 
largely on the adequacy with which the child at 
different periods is able to co-ordinate himself 
with the elements appearing in his conscious 
environment. It is possible that the question 
may arise as to why there should be this out- 
stripping of the world of possible reactions by 
the world of consciously felt possibilities, or why 
does the image run ahead of the motor adjust- 
ments. We can only leave the problem open. 
As for external factors, it is undoubtedly true 
that about this time the child does come into a 
broader and more bewildering environment. We 
stated above that the first interests centered about 
activities rather than the objects manipulated or 
the ends that might be attained through them. 
It is functionally necessary from the standpoint 
of the growing sense-organs and muscles that 
the strongest interests should rest at first in the 
mere play of these elements. Gradually, however, 
the interest shifts to objects and ends. The 
transition cannot be made without a certain feel- 
ing of helplessness in the presence of the new 
world. 

Biological explanation. — On the biological 
side it may be said that, in general, all growth 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 177 

is unequal. All parts of an organism do not 
increase at the same time in the same proportions. 
It is possible that, while the centers that control 
the sensori-motor co-ordinations are rapidly de- 
veloping, the higher, ideational ones are relatively 
quiescent. When the tide turns, the higher 
centers make relatively greater strides and are left, 
as it were, in the air, without the support of an 
adequate sensori-motor equipment. The curves 
in Donaldson's Growth of the Brain''- indicate that 
after the age of four the rate of increase of brain- 
weight falls off very rapidly. The changes in 
the brain at this time must be those connected 
with the medullation of association fibers and 
other elaboration of the finer brain structure. It 
is at least conceivable that this may be the physi- 
ological counterpart of the rapid elaboration of 
imagery at this period. Thus also may we 
account for the apparent uncertainty in children's 
power of attention at this time.. The attention 
is really constant enough within the limits of a 
given image or activity, but the imagery is 
flitting. The concentration of attention is impos- 
sible aside from the immediate, spontaneous out- 
flow of energy within a given image. 

Various characteristic activities of the period. 
— We find many statements, like this of Chamber- 

T. los. 



178 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

Iain's, that the sixth year is a period of both 
intellectual and bodily regression; but it will 
not do to accept them too readily. The objective 
manifestations of growth may be checked, but 
the organism may be taking stock and perfecting 
delicate adjustments of even greater importance 
than mere increase in height and weight. 

Kline^ regards the years from four to seven 
as the second running-away period. Then likes 
and dislikes first begin to play an important role, 
and there is a certain unrest, a craving to rove, 
especially if home is unpleasant. This activity, 
if it is correctly reported, plays very readily in 
with the disparity of image with capacity for 
realization. The first running-away period was 
from two to four, when it was aimless, without 
consciousness of danger, an almost reflex activity. 

Gulick^ says of the games from three to six 
that they are rarely spontaneous; that they tend 
to be individual, but are not competitive. Cross- 
welP says amusements begin to center about 
objects at six, objects used symbolically, or as a 
means through which to exercise the impulse to 

^"Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct," Peda- 
gogical Seminary, Vol. V, p. 381. 

^"Psychological, etc., Aspects of Group Games," ibid., 
Vol. VI, p. 135. 

'"Amusements of Worcester School Children," ibid., p. 
314- 



CHILD DEVELOP AlENT 179 

action. Imitative games are highest at six, and 
more so in girls than in boys. 

The inabihty of the child, at this time, to grasp 
and be interested in any very large wholes is seen 
in the fact that children of six and seven, in 
telling what they wish to become when grown 
up,^ always name some prominent detail in the 
adult activity of their immediate environment, 
never the occupation as such. For instance, a 
little girl who really wishes to become a house- 
keeper will say rather that she wishes to wash 
dishes or sweep. A boy, instead of saying he 
wishes to be a blacksmith, will say he wants to 
shoe horses. We may say, if we wish, that this 
is due to inability to make abstractions at this 
age. This is no doubt true, but the point is that 
it is the striking detail, and not its setting, that is 
of interest. 

The collecting instinct^ of these years is char- 
acteristic. From three or four to eight years of 
age, if the child collects, it is usually miscellaneous 
and trivial articles — spools, strings, broken dishes, 
etc. The mania is crude and groping ; the things 

^Taylor, "A Preliminary Study of Children's Hopes," 
Report of State Superintendent of Public Instruction, New 
York, 1896, Vol. II, p. 992. 

^BuRK, "The Collecting Instinct," Pedagogical Seminary, 
Vol. VII, p. 179 ; Barnes, "Children's Collections," Studies in 
Education, Vol. I, p. 144. 



i8o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

collected are such as are easy to lay hands on. 
Hence the collections are scrappy and not pur- 
poseful in the adult sense. Lindley^ finds that 
in this period is the culmination of the interest 
in guess games, original riddles, etc. 

Summary of the first period. — The most satis- 
factory generalization of this period's interests 
is that they center about the direct activities sug- 
gested by the immediate objects of the environ- 
ment. The emphasis is always on the activity, 
and seldom does the object as such intrude; 
hence the absolute freedom of symbolism and 
play; hence also the lack of regard for ends to 
be attained in play and the absorption of all 
energy in the mere response. The child of this 
period has definite general ideas, but they are very 
narrow ones, according exactly with the limits of 
his environment. If he attempts to transcend 
these limits, he is vague and unintelligible. 

From the standpoint of control we note that 
every activity assists in the fixing of the free, 
large use of the body. Things are handled and 
looked at, and the activities of older people are 
imitated, not for their own value, but because 
they furnish simple stimuli. We may say, in 
fine, that activity of all simple kinds is a function 

^"A Study of Puzzles," American Journal of Psychology, 
Vol. VIII, pp. 431-43- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT i8i 

of all developing organisms, and that the objec- 
tive world, in so far as it is an object of interest, 
is such from its value as immediate stimulus, and 
not for its intrinsic or remote qualities. 

General characteristics of the second period. — 
The first part of the next period (seven to nine), 
especially, is one of slow physical development. 
As stated on a preceding page, energy is probably 
being consumed in effecting the finer motor 
adjustments that are eventually to be correlated 
with the rapidly elaborating ideational centers of 
the cortex. This is, then, the beginning of the 
interest in details. The element of skill is now 
for the first time important in the child-conscious- 
ness. His interest in the broader environment 
expands co-ordinately with increased complexity 
of the psycho-physical organism and consequent 
increased possibility of interaction of the various 
elements that make up himself internally and 
externally. At the beginning of the period the 
interest begins to shift from the act itself to the 
result it is to bring to pass. The element of 
success is a very prominent feature in determin- 
ing interest. The child is now more than at 
any other period unwilling to do even simple 
things, unless he feels assured of a successful 
issue. The keynote of this period is that of 
control, transferred definitely from the organism 



i82 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

itself to the environment, which is conceived of 
as containing a series of ends important to the 
child. His activities are now directed toward 
ends that are regarded for the first time as defi- 
nitely his own. 

Characteristic activities. — Games are exclu- 
sively individual, but competitive, during the first 
three or four years of the period.^ They involve 
as their mainly significant features motor co- 
ordinations and exercise in sense-judgments. 
Activity is at first incoherent and lacking in nice 
adjustments; a weak period (Bryan). ^ There 
are some group games at eight and nine, but 
they are unstable ones. Imitative games continue 
prominent till ten years in boys, and in girls till 
eleven.^ Such games are always much more com- 
mon with girls than with boys. Boys' interest in 
running games is high from the very first, and 
continues so without much variation. Girls' 
interest in running games is always far below 
that of boys, and declines rapidly after the age 
of eight. 

^GULICK, Op. cit. 

""Nascent Stages, etc.," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VII, 
P- 357. 

"'Amusements of Worcester School Children," ibid., Vol. 

VI, p. 314; "The Play of Some S. C. Children," ibid., Vol. 

VII, p. 459. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 183 

Bryan^ makes this time — from about eight 
to nine or ten — a transition period of equal, if not 
greater, importance than puberty. He speaks of 
it as a great fatigue period due to rapid physical 
growth. That this is a time of rapid physical 
growth is not supported by the anthropometric 
measurements reported by Burk.^ Barnes finds 
the interest in striking biographies and stirring 
events is high here, and continues so until the age 
of eleven. 

Siegert^ also says this is a time (eight to nine) 
when children fatigue rapidly, giving as the 
reason that the body is too large for the circula- 
tory organs. Chamberlain^ calls it the second 
regressive period, but does not say why or in 
what respect. Kline^ makes the third running- 
away period begin here and connects it with 
incapacity to exert persistent effort to overcome 
difficulties or dislikes. He calls it a survival of 
the migrating instinct, and holds that there is 
great carelessness of the person and property at 
this time. 

It seems probable from the above statements 

^Loc. cit. 

'American Journal of Psychology, Vol. IX. 

^Die Periodicitdt in der Entzvickelung der Kindernatur, 
Leipzig, 1 89 1. 

*r/te Child, etc., chap. iv. ^Op. cit. 



i84 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

that, from some cause or other, these years of 
eight and nine are characterized by a certain lack 
of adjustment in the child that makes him appear 
to disadvantage with both those younger and 
those older. We believe that the apparent regres- 
sion is only a surface phenomenon, and that it 
may well be due to bewilderment, to a halting that 
occurs till the new adjustments are working more 
smoothly. As we saw above, there is good reason 
to believe that the emphasis about this time 
changes very markedly from interest in direct 
output of energy to interest in the objects with 
which activity deals and the ends to which it is 
directed. The child thus rapidly comes to con- 
sciousness of a new world requiring a radical 
change in his adjustments, physical and psychi- 
cal. All the characteristics noted can easily be 
the result of such a condition. The lack of 
definitely worked out co-ordinations is shown 
in the unwillingness of the child to try to do 
what will not plainly be successful. Activity 
no longer flows immediately from the image, 
whatever it may be, regardless of whether it 
reaches its end or not. With the end definitely 
realized as a thing to be reached, the child soon 
acquires the attitude that activity as such is no 
longer in itself satisfactory. He soon learns from 
sad experience that his means for using these 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 185 

things and reaching these ends are very inade- 
quate. He, who had once been merged in his 
activities, is thus gradually isolated and often 
thrown back on himself, thus increasing his sense 
of self, accentuating, as it were, his egoistic 
attitudes. Such an emergence of the self into 
a world of ends that cannot yet be realized in 
action, and that are perhaps not even realized in 
thought, but only felt as a series of vaguely under- 
stood demands — all this, we repeat, produces an 
attitude of distrust and diffidence that is only too 
easily fostered. Entirely aside, then, from any 
possibility of our having here a recapitulation of 
the migrating instinct, it is perfectly conceivable 
that the immature organism of the child should, 
in such a situation, internal and external, be 
especially restless and impatient of restraint, dis- 
inclined to overcome difficulties, etc. If this 
really is a distinct running-away period, it is easy 
to see that it should be, as Kline says, caused by 
the lack of ability boys have to stand the restraints 
of home life, especially if they are arbitrary and 
unresponsive to his peculiar emotional attitude. 
The same reaction against the environmental 
order comes out in a study of children's ideas 
about punishments.^ Up to nine or ten they gen- 

^Frear, "Class Punishment," Studies in Education, Vol. I, 
P- 332. 



i86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

erally maintain that their punishments have been 
unjust because they were not guilty. In the 
studies of children's ambitions there is at eight 
and one-half a marked decrease in the number 
of boys selecting the father's occupation — another 
evidence of a feeling of uncertainty in the midst 
of new demands. At the same age nearly one- 
half give no reason for their choice of vocation — 
a greater percentage than among younger or 
older children. In some simple mental tests the 
age of eight was marked by a great increase in 
error. In the childish collections there is little 
effort before nine to classify even crudely the 
objects collected. That this is really a period 
of bewilderment and maladjustment comes out 
more strikingly if we contrast it with the years 
of ten and eleven, roughly speaking. These 
years are conspicuous for the seeming satisfaction 
and confidence with which the child goes into 
things, showing that he has taken an important 
step in the control that must accompany all real 
worth. We shall return to this in a few para- 
graphs. 

As to other characteristics of these early years 
of the period, we note that the sense of the 
widening world is indicated by the various trades 
being now most popular with boys. With girls 
the influence of imitation is illustrated in the fact 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 187 

that nearly all girls at eight, nine, and ten wish to 
be teachers or dressmakers. The boy's desire to 
be soldier is highest here, and his reason for it 
has shifted from that at seven, when he was 
attracted by the drum and parade, to the desire 
now to fight for his country.^ 

Some investigators think, from a study in 
children's inferences and reasonings, that there 
is, at the end of the ninth year, a marked increase 
in the logical faculty.^ At the age of nine and 
a half or ten the number of those giving reasons 
why they wish to follow such and such vocations 
also rapidly increases. 

Play interests. — Naturally that portion of the 
period of which we are now speaking, during 
which the most rapid physical development 
occurs, will be a time of interest in vigorous 
physical exercise. Studies of the plays and 
games of children in various localities all unite 
in attributing to the period between ten and 
twelve years those games affording the most 
vigorous activity for the whole body. Literest 
in these active games almost exactly coincides 
with the period of greatest immunity to disease 

^WiLLARD, "Children's Ambitions," Studies in Education, 
Vol. I, p. 243 ; "A Preliminary Study of Children's Hopes," 
New York Report, i8g6, Vol. II, p. 992. 

"Mary S. Barnes, "The Development of the Historical 
Sense in Children," Studies in Education, Vol. I, pp. 43, 83. 



i88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

and most rapid increase in height and weight.^ 
In one study 20 per cent, of the games were char- 
acterized by running; in another, 35 per cent, 
were of this character, the maximal point of the 
curve being at eleven years.^ The games are all 
characterized by a restless activity. Some inves- 
tigators think that children of this period (ten to 
twelve) resj)ond readily to fatigue, but recover 
rapidly.^ 

In the games earlier than ten and eleven the 
chief elements seem to be those that facilitate the 
development of motor co-ordinations and sense- 
judgments. The later games are calculated to 
give scope and depth to the previously acquired 
co-ordinations. The years between ten and 
twelve or thirteen are regarded by many, and 
probably rightly so, as a time in which reserve 
power is being stored up for the rapid growth of 
the next few years. These interests in vigorous 
activity are both the means by which this energy 
is stored up and as well the proof of its presence. 
We have seen above that it is likely that just the 

'See charts. The curves here reproduced are taken from 
Burk's monograph in American Journal of Psychology, 
Vol. IX. 

"Crosswell and McGhee, Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VI, 
p. 314, and Vol. VII, p. 459. 

^Bryan, "Nascent Stages, etc.," Pedagogical Seminary, 
Vol. VII, p. 357; Hancock, A'^. E. A. Report, 1897, p. 851. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 189 

reverse of this occurs from eight till nine, when 
the curve of growth declines, and this was inter- 
preted to mean that energy was being consumed 
in effecting and elaborating co-ordinations. We 
get further evidence for this from the studies in 
games. The motor discharges at first are rela- 
tively uncontrolled, but by the end of the period 
relatively well organized and regulated. One of 
the chief problems on the mental side, during all 
these years, is to find ideas or images adequate 
to furnish direction for the energy that rapidly 
becomes available. The prominent place that 
skill as such comes to have in the mind is evidence 
of the fact that increase in motor control is itself 
interesting. Interest in details of workmanship 
and the more intricate games arises coincidently 
with power to make finer muscular adjustments. 
The studies (to which reference has been 
made) in what children want to become when 
they grow up throw further light on the point 
of view at ten or thereabout. It is then that a 
critical attitude is first noticed toward the prob- 
lem of occupations. This is certainly a sign of 
growing independence in the midst of hitherto 
bewildering details. At this age also a greater 
number of occupations are mentioned by each 
child — an indication that by this time the activity 
to do many things has been acquired and the 



I90 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

child yields to the new sense of power by aspiring 
to, and confidently expecting to engage in, many 
vocations. In other words, he is interested in his 
world still in the gross. He has learned to master 
a few details here and there, but does not yet 
realize how many more there are for him in a 
single pursuit. He thinks symbolically of each 
occupation by some one or two of the details 
of its work that he sees clearly, and from these 
he builds up his detailed world, adding them 
together as so many scattered elements. His 
interest in details is not, then, an organized and 
efficient one, but the beginning of the breaking 
up of his undifferentiated environment. This 
same attitude comes out in studies of children's 
drawings.^ At six the child draws facts, not 
appearances. An apple with a pin stuck through 
is represented at this age in a drawing showing 
the whole pin. At eight to ten the correct 
appearance is drawn, but only schematically. 
The drawing might apply to any apple. In gen- 
eral the drawings of this latter period are said 
to be symbolic. Details come in, if many, in 

^LuKENS, "A Study of Children's Drawings," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. IV, p. 79 ; Barnes, "Art of Little Children," 
ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 302. See also the series of articles on the 
same subject running through the two volumes of Barnes's 
Studies in Education ; Clark, "The Child's Attitude toward 
Perspective Problems," Studies in Education, p. 283. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 191 

a tangled mixture, but generally one is fixed 
upon to stand for the whole individuality of the 
object — just as we saw above in choice of occupa- 
tions. Dr. Hall found this especially noticeable 
in the Sand-Pile Community that he describes so 
minutely.^ In the construction of everything the 
boys selected some one element and emphasized 
it with all their skill. The barn gates were 
"admirably mortised and hung." In drawings 
the girl or boy is represented with buttons, hat, 
pipe, or spectacles, etc. ; a house, with a keyhole ; 
and so on. There is, says Dr. Hall, a great 
undefined whole, with some one or two features 
alone made real. We also remark at this time 
a noticeable increase in profile drawings of people, 
indicating a growing sense of things as they 
really appear. 

In summary of the characteristics of these few 
years, we may say that they seem to be marked 
off from what comes before by the greater isola- 
tion of the image from the activity, and a certain 
bewilderment in the midst of many activities 
realized as possible, but for which the organism 
is not yet adjusted. This lack of adjustment is 
accompanied by certain marked emotional peculi- 
arities, as mentioned above. On the other hand, 

*G. S. Hall, "The Story of a Sand Pile," Scribner's 
Magazine, Vol. Ill (June, 1888), pp. 690-96. 



192 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

it is to be distinguished from the immediately 
succeeding years by its being a period of retarded 
growth and hesitant attitude of mind, as com- 
pared with the intense activities and well worked 
out adjustments of the next years. 

Pre-adolescent interests. — Co-operative acti- 
vity in sports of all kinds is a marked pre- 
adolescent phenomenon with boys.^ The social 
feelings that later form so much of the content 
of life seem to be nascent in these early associa- 
tions. Group and co-operative games are a 
matter of course in the adolescent period, but here 
they stand out as a marked characteristic because 
of their very contrast with the individualism in 
the sports of the earlier years. When co-operative 
games are played before eleven, there is little 
feeling of solidarity. The boy is generally will- 
ing to sacrifice the interest of the group to his 
personal glorification. The earlier interest in 
such games seems to be proportionate to the 
amount of opportunity they afford for the exhibi- 
tion of personal prowess, but the pre-adolescent 
glories in the fact that it is his club or team that 
has won. 

^See Studies in Games referred to above ; Sheldon, 
"Institutional Activities of American Children," American 
Journal of Psychology, Vol. IX ; Rudimentary Societies among 
Boys, "Johns Hopkins University Studies," No. XI, Second 
Series, 1884. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 193 

This is a marked time of susceptibility to 
influence of others — another indication of the 
coming to consciousness of social relationships. 
The age of twelve has been found to be of 
greatest susceptibility to evil influence — an 
evidence of the beginning of the imperious atti- 
tude toward restraint that is so prominent in the 
next few years. There is some indication that 
there is here a beginning of definitely directed 
lines of interest. For instance, girls show fewer 
definite preferences for many different occupations 
at eleven than at nine. At thiueen, more girls 
wish to be dressmakers and milliners than ever 
before — 45 per cent. ; more even than wish to 
be teachers, which vocation has hitherto been 
most in favor. 

At about twelve there is a period of uncer- 
tainty corresponding to the previous one about 
eight, but on an entirely different level. Then 
it was due to the disparity between image and 
motor adjustment. Now it is rather due to the 
felt disparity of the self with the complex social 
situation, or, to state it in terms parallel to those 
first used, the disparity between the images of 
social values and the mental adjustment neces- 
sary to their actual assimilation. This point is 
illustrated in the further studies in children's 
choice of vocations. Where several are men- 



194 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

tioned by one child at this age, it is nearly 
always disjunctively, as if for the first time the 
powers of the self were mistrusted and the uncer- 
tainties of the future keenly felt. 

In the mental tests referred to above ^ there is 
a rapid decrease in error at twelve, indicating a 
marked virility of mind, that should be correlated 
with the rapid increase in height and weight and 
resistance to disease already beginning or soon 
to begin. The strengthening of social instincts 
is further indicated by the fact that the period of 
ten to thirteen is pre-eminently the one for the 
formation of secret societies and clubs.^ Natu- 
rally enough the basis on which they are formed 
is very different from the associations of adult 
life. The child's dominant interests at the time 
furnish the ground from which he comes to con- 
sciousness of the need of co-operation with his 
fellows. These dominant interests are without 
doubt in the sphere of physical activity and eager- 
ness for adventure. Hence of boys' clubs and 
societies by far the majority are athletic or preda- 
tory. Corresponding with this dominance of 
sensori-motor activity we find the interest in Old 
Testament stories stronger now than at any other 

^Hancock, "Mental Differences of School Children," 
N. E. A., 1897, pp. 851-57. 

'Sheldon, op. cit. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 195 

time.^ Boys' interest in the Old Testament cul- 
minates at eleven, with 60 per cent, of them 
preferring this portion of the Bible. Of all the 
characters, David is the favorite at this period, 
and his life is surely typical of just the interests 
we have described as pre-adolescent. 

Another interesting characteristic of this time 
is that of collections.^ These are now at their 
height in number and genuineness. For the first 
time the boy does not depend almost exclusively 
on finding objects or having them given to him 
for his collections. Trading becomes now a well- 
recognized and important means of building up 
his collections — another evidence of the rise of 
the social consciousness. Trading continues high 
from eleven to fifteen. It is not until well into 
the adolescent period that collections become in 
any sense scientific; but even before, there are 
efforts to classify, mostly on the basis of color 
and size, however. This is an advance on the 
previous collections, for then even this was lack- 
ing. 

On the more strictly intellectual side, it is 
noteworthy that the puzzle interest culminates 
at twelve.^ Lindley regards this as distinctly 

^Dawson, "Children's Interest in the Bible," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. VII, p. 157. 

^BuRK, "The Collecting Instinct," ibid., p. 179. 

°"A Study of Puzzles," American Journal of Psychology, 
Vol. VIII, pp. 431 ff. 



196 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

a pre-pubertal phenomenon. At this time there 
is a certain equihbrium that permits a surplus of 
energy to be expended in intellectual play before 
the more serious intellectual problems of adoles- 
cence. This puzzle interest is then an evidence 
of mental freedom, a breaking away from the 
narrowness of childhood. Thus the co-ordina- 
tions are worked out on the intellectual side at 
twelve and thirteen, much as they were on the 
physical side at or before ten, and in each case 
we have a characteristic play attitude. Of the 
kinds of puzzles, the mechanical seem to be the 
favorites at eleven, the geometrical at twelve and 
thirteen, and the arithmetical and language va- 
rieties in the years following. 

Development of interests corresponds to devel- 
opment of the personality. — Thus far, in the 
discussion of this period of childhood (seven to 
twelve) we have dealt chiefly with the character- 
istic interests and dispositions of the beginning 
and close of the period, as each is a transition 
time and the child's attitude of mind is, in a 
sense, the same in each. We selected facts that 
would bring out the analogous character of these 
two periods and, as well, accentuate their differ- 
ences. We turn now to data scattered indiffer- 
ently through the period, and will note, if possible, 
if they can be correlated as the expression of a 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 197 

developing personality. We shall try to find 
evidence of unfolding mental and emotional char- 
acteristics, and will expect to find coincident with 
this unfolding a gradual breaking away from 
immediate surroundings and an assertion of 
increasing independence in all lines of activity. 

We note, in the first place, that a large amount 
of the material relating to these years can be 
centralized, either positively or negatively, about 
susceptibility to, or imitation of, things in the 
immediate environment. 

Eight to ten is generally recognized as a period 
of great susceptibility to suggestion and imita- 
tion.^ The child of eight tends to imitate specific 
acts. He does not generalize in his imitation, 
and thus get back of the act to the attitude 
prompting it; nor does he seek to imitate the 
larger whole of which the act is a part. The 
same susceptibility, but on a higher plane, appears 
from eleven to seventeen in girls and twelve to 
nineteen in boys — the period of greatest openness 
to good influence by teacher or friend, culminat- 
ing in boys at sixteen and in girls at fourteen. 

The disposition to imitate is largely determina- 
tive of the direction of ambition. Thus at nine, 
68 per cent, of girls wish to be teachers, while 
only 30 per cent, aim to be dressmakers and 10 

*Frear, "Imitation," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. IV, p. 
382. 



198 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

per cent, stenographers. This is clearly due to 
the teacher being the most prominent factor at 
that time in so many girls' environments. Boys 
likewise, up to age of ten, reacting to the element 
that impresses them most of all, aspire to become 
firemen, policemen, and engineers. At nine, 35 
per cent, choose the father's occupation, but this 
decreases rapidly in popularity till eleven. The 
fact that eight and nine is a transition period, 
a time when adjustments are being worked out, 
makes it all the more likely to be markedly imita- 
tive. It is then that the child turns to his sur- 
roundings to find what he feels is most deficient 
in himself. Consciousness of his own insuffi- 
ciency brings him to consciousness of the objective 
values in his environment. The immediate 
environment furnishes most of the objects of 
most early collections, and between eight and 
eleven girls especially depend on having things 
given to them rather than on finding them or 
trading for them. There can be no doubt but 
that the chief stimulus to the forming of collec- 
tions is the example of associates. The next 
most important cause is desire for quantity, which 
depends for its significance on the presence of 
other collections and the necessity of surpassing 
them, so that here again is marked susceptibility 
to what others are doing. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 199 

Boys at thirteen have a second period in which 
a tendency to choose the father's occupation 
appears. As was seen above, the mental attitude 
that is at the bottom of this second tendency is 
exactly analogous to that of the earlier period, 
when the same thing occurs. At first it was due 
to the uncertainty and bewilderment felt on com- 
ing into touch with the broader world of things 
and ends to be worked toward. In the latter 
case, the same uncertainty arises as the boy comes 
to a consciousness of the complexity of the duties 
involved in any one vocation and his own inade- 
quacy in the midst of them. He was at first 
confused by the breaking up of the entire environ- 
ment; now it is by the breaking up of the 
particular unities in the environment. 

Earl Barnes's studies in the ideals of English 
children^ furnish abundant evidence of the rapid 
transference of the center of interest from the 
immediate to the more remote, and at the same 
time confirm what has come out in several studies 
referred to, namely, that girls tend to be more 
imitative and less general in their interests than 
boys. We give below a brief summary of his 
study, but as it is made only among a certain class 
of children, no conclusions other than the general 

^"Children's Ideals," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VII, pp. 
3-12; Darrah-Dyke, "Children's Ideals," Popular Science 
Monthly, May, 1898. 



200 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

ones given here should be drawn from it without 
first consulting the article itself. 

At eight years of age 42 per cent, of the boys 
who were studied in the London board schools 
chose a character in the immediate environment 
as their ideal. With the girls it was 49 per cent. 
The percentage of children making such a choice 
decreased as follows from eight to thirteen : 
boys, 42, 40, 26, II, 16, 15. At twelve and 
thirteen there is thus a significant increase in 
susceptibility to environment — a fact mentioned 
above and for which an explanation was then 
offered. Girls' choice of an acquaintance for an 
ideal, beginning at 49 per cent, at eight years, runs 
as follows for the years till thirteen: nine, 51; 
ten, 37; eleven, 27; twelve, 18; thirteen, 14 per 
cent. In every case the percentage is higher with 
the girls except at thirteen. 

The opposite interest, that in historical and 
public characters, showed in general an increase 
with years. Thus the boys' percentages run from 
eight years thus : 17, 17, 34, 50, 60, 69. With the 
girls we have : 2^, 14, 21, 40, 46, 44. The public 
characters were mostly remote ones, and included 
few celebrities of the day except Queen Victoria 
and Gladstone. Few literary characters were 
mentioned. Studies among children from the 
schools of the better classes showed correspond- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 201 

ingly broader spheres of interest. The percent- 
ages from the London board schools may be taken 
as representative of the attitudes of the children 
of comparatively restricted opportunities. For 
further details the reader is referred to the article 
itself and to further reports on the same line of 
study given in Studies in Education, Vol. IL 

Before leaving this subject, we may note that a 
comparison of the English study with an Ameri- 
can one brings out the significant fact that for 
every age the sphere of interest is larger with 
the average American child than with the English 
board-school child. The interest of American 
girls in the life and work of men is always far 
above that of the English girls. Mr. Barnes 
accounts for this from the fact that the American 
girl has no great feminine character in public 
life to aspire to be like, as does the English 
girl in Queen Victoria. 

Closely connected with this transfer of interest 
from the immediate to the remote is of course 
the development of the social interests and activi- 
ties. This has already been partly discussed. 
We have seen that true co-operative games do not 
begin till ten or eleven, and that if such games 
are played before that time there is little com- 
bined action, the games being more important 
for showing individual feats than for gaining a 



202 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

common victory. The marked quarrelsomeness 
of the earlier period is evidence of the lack of a 
definite co-operative impulse. Interest in hide- 
and-seek, a relatively individual game, culminates 
at ten and then suddenly drops. After the 
twelfth year interest in ball games rises from 15 
per cent, to 26 per cent, in four years. Interest 
in relievo, a co-operative running game, culmi- 
nates at ten with hide-and-seek, but unlike the 
latter it continues high till fourteen. Girls' 
interest in co-operative games is less than boys'. 
The age at which such interest culminates is 
about twelve. Their favorite amusements are 
with dolls and jumping the rope, both of which 
are individualistic, at least not co-operative with 
reference to a common end as with so many 
boys' sports. Dolls, it Is true, furnish satisfac- 
tion to social feelings, but these are of the 
narrower sort. The only real co-operative game 
with girls, as indicated in this study, is croquet, 
which does not become prominent till twelve, 
and even this is an only imperfectly co-operative 
sport. 

In studies in children's aspirations, altruistic 
feelings definitely appear at twelve and naturally 
first with reference to parents. At fourteen the 
various social virtues are recognized as necessary 
for success In business. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 203 

We have already noted the large number of 
secret societies formed by boys at the period 
between ten and fifteen. Eighty-seven per cent, 
are formed in these years. Seven per cent, are 
formed before ten and i per cent, at seventeen of 
later. Physical activity is the keynote of these 
societies, 'jj per cent, being predatory and 
athletic. The number of voluntary organiza- 
tions at this period for literature, art, or music 
is very small; the number for religious purposes 
is infinitesimal. Boys in these years are much 
less likely to patronize societies organized for 
them by adults than are girls. 

Sex differences of interests. — We may next 
note specifically some marked sex-differences not 
already alluded to. Boys have a few intensely 
popular games that surpass all others by many 
hundred per cent., while with girls there are a 
large number of games of medium popularity, but 
almost none pre-eminently above the rest. The 
girls have no games that can compare in popu- 
larity with baseball and football.^ This is per- 
haps not really a sex-difference, but a phenom- 
enon due rather to girls' restricted opportunities 
and the lack of suitable games for them to enter 
into heartily in large numbers. We must remem- 
ber, however, that this very lack is significant, to 

^McGhee, op. cit. 



204 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

a certain extent, of different impulses to engage in 
such games. Boys' sports and opportunities are 
largely the expression of certain definite and in- 
tense impulses for certain sorts of activity. 

We referred above to the difference in the 
ideals of London boys and girls. We note also 
in this and other studies of Mr. Barnes's that the 
girls are much more ready and willing to answer 
the questions and give reasons for preferences 
than are boys. This may mean that girls are 
more suggestible than boys, or that they have 
greater ability to express themselves. We have 
also seen that girls rarely find or trade articles 
in making collections, as do boys. 

In the mental tests there is less irregularity in 
girls' curves of success and error than in boys' ;^ 
this confirms much evidence from other sources 
that the interests of girls unfold more regularly 
than do boys', but do not extend so far. The 
athletic clubs of boys are replaced by musical, 
social, and literary organizations with girls, but 
usually at a much later age. At the period when 
boys are most active in these institutional activi- 
ties girls are doing almost nothing of the kind. 
An interesting instance of this may be found in 
Hall's "Story of a Sand Pile." 

^Hancock, op. cit. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 205 

In studies in superstitions of childhood ^ 
marked sex-differences come out. Girls are 
found to have more superstitious beliefs than 
boys. A marked peculiarity of all such beliefs 
is their personal character, that is, the tendency 
for each individual to have his own peculiar 
belief. By far the largest number of supersti- 
tions are mentioned by only one child. This 
seems to be especially so with boys, and the 
investigator suggests that this is because boys 
are less social than girls. Our study, thus far, 
has not confirmed this view, and we suggest that 
it may be due to the fact that boys display more 
initiative and individuality than girls, and hence 
are less under the influence of social suggestion, 
while being still keenly social in their activities. 
Girls have many superstitions in love-lore, while 
boys do not. This points to a fundamental emo- 
tional difference in the sexes. Boys, having the 
more active part to play, take things into their 
own hands, while girls, for much the same reasons 
as primitive man, resort to magic. 

In tests as to children's sense of the practical, 
boys seem to be ahead of girls.- Girls below the 
age of twelve were weak in the sense of the 

^VosTROVSKY, "A Story of Children's Superstitions," 
Barnes's Studies in Education, Vol. I, p. 123. 

^KoHLER, "Children's Sense of Money," ibid., Vol. I, 
P- 323- 



2o6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

practical. The girl's pleasures after twelve seem 
to be more subjective and less common than is 
the case with the boy's. He lives in a wider 
world ; his pleasures are those of other boys. 

With boys the desire to be well dressed appears 
markedly for the first time from twelve to six- 
teen, but it seems to be merely an element of the 
broader sex-consciousness. With girls the mat- 
ter is much more definitely conscious and is 
rather an expression of individuality and taste. 

The emotional accompaniments of the various 
periods of childhood, of course, vary widely. 
The transition periods of eight and nine, and 
twelve and thirteen, seem to be times of some 
emotional instability. Boys, in general, seem 
more overt, active, intense; girls more subjective, 
diffuse, and medium in likes and dislikes. In one 
study of the play-interest^ it was found that after 
nine years there was a marked increase in girls' 
preference for games of chance (those, of course, 
of a harmless juvenile character). From nine to 
eighteen the interest increased from 7 to 45 per 
cent, of all games chosen by girls; while games 
having this element most prominent were never 
chosen by boys above 9 per cent. Marbles are, 
of course, often played so as to be a game of 
chance, but the element of skill and overt activity 

^McGhee, op. cit. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 207 

is also so prominent as to render its appeal to 
boys a many-sided one. The games of this 
character usually chosen by the girls were com- 
paratively quiet ones in which the element of 
chance was the dominant feature. Such games 
are enjoyed, if at all, for the emotional response 
which they excite without involving any violent 
overt exertion. It is not likely that we have here 
any fundamental sex-difference, but rather a phe- 
nomenon forced by the girl's exclusion from the 
active sports open to the boy. 

In this same study it was found that boys' 
choices of games involving running, rivalry, and 
co-operation were always high, while the only 
class in which the girls equaled the boys was in 
that in which rivalry was predominant. The 
two classes in which the girls surpassed the boys 
were those involving imitation and chance. 

Boys' moral ideals at ten are negative rather 
than positive; that is, the fragments of adult 
morality that they have imbibed are of this sort. 
For instance, they wish to avoid bad habits — a 
probable reflection of much of their moral teach- 
ing. Girls, on the other hand, express as their 
highest desire the being good to others. 

Practical interests appear clearly at ten or 
eleven. At ten, boys mention for the first time 
concrete occupations as the content of their 



2o8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

aspirations. At twelve and after the desire to 
make useful things is prominent. It is not till 
then that purposeful activities covering any con- 
siderable length of time begin. Girls' interest 
in dressmaking, clerking, stenography is very 
prominent at the beginning of adolescence. The 
interest of boys from ten to thirteen is most of 
all in trades of various kinds ; afterward business 
and professional life. At fourteen they are apt to 
introduce various practical considerations in their 
choice of occupations. They seem to be coming 
to consciousness of the real problems involved in 
work which before the age of twelve they had 
realized only vaguely. 



CHAPTER XIV 

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON INTERESTS. METHOD- 
OLOGY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Character of the literature on interests. — This 
sketch of the development of interests has been 
fragmentary and in many respects unsatisfactory, 
but it fairly presents most of the material that 
has been gathered together thus far by those who 
have made empirical studies in child-life. Three 
or four important studies have been omitted : In 
the first place, one by O'Shea, "Interests in Child- 
hood."^ This contains the results of a valuable 
series of studies, but they are not classified defi- 
nitely enough as to age to be available for such 
a study as this. There are also three lines of 
investigation having much in common, carried 
out by Binet, Barnes, and Shaw, that are widely 
known, but the results of which are so abstract 
as to render them of doubtful value except in a 
general way. Their general scheme is to get the 
child's response to selected spoken or written 
words. For details of method those interested 
are referred to the articles themselves. 

The method undoubtedly yields good results 

Khild Study Monthly, Vol. II, p. 266. 
209 



2IO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

in a general way, but the answers given by the 
children seem too much the result of mere word- 
association to be of great value for detailed con- 
clusions. Barnes, for instance, finds interest in 
the uses of things the predominant one, and 
Shaw, from a slightly different standpoint of 
interpretation, shows that from his results 
interest in activity is by all means predominant. 
All the rubrics used in these studies are more or 
less abstract, leaving a wide margin within which 
the interpreter could shift his data. It is also 
questionable how far the child's definition of a 
single word, or his first response on seeing or 
hearing it, can be taken as a reliable index of 
his mental attitude toward that particular aspect 
of the world in general. 

It will be noted that we have not attempted, 
except incidentally, to touch upon the interests 
of adolescence. This period is already so thor- 
oughly worked out and the results so well 
collected that it is superfluous to go into the 
subject again. It is the first twelve or thirteen 
years that have as yet lacked an organized and 
complete statement. Regarding these first years, 
also, it has been the most difficult to gain accurate 
information, because we must rely largely on the 
objective manifestations either in various forms 
of bodily activity or in the expressions of mental 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 211 

content in drawings, written work of various 
kinds, etc. It is clear that all our positive knowl- 
edge of the actual attitudes lying back of these 
overt expressions must be only very indirectly 
established. Some psychologists have attempted 
to get at the problem by having the child report 
his own introspections. But, however desirable 
it may be to get direct accounts, we must regard 
all attempts to build up our knowledge in this 
way as utterly fallacious. 

Generalisations unsafe. — Hitherto we have not 
raised the question as to how far it is safe for 
us to generalize the conclusions of individual 
studies. Granting that they have all, as far as 
they go, been carefully made, we nevertheless see 
at once that a slight change in locality, or more 
especially in social status of the subjects, might 
modify very materially many of the details. 
This is illustrated most markedly in the difference 
in the ideals of the London board-school children 
and those of the children attending the better 
schools of the middle and upper classes. Still, 
even here the difference is rather in degree than 
in kind. It is safe to assume that every normal 
child has certain characteristic reactions in virtue 
of his being a developing organism. We have 
endeavored in selecting the material for this study 
to take that which emphasized the broad general 



212 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

tendencies rather than what on its face is merely 
particular or at least more contingent. 

The further question as to how far the indi- 
vidual child may be expected to vary from the 
norms, if these could only be established, is also 
an interesting one. It was pointed out on an 
earlier page that the younger the child, the more 
nearly does it approach a common type. It is 
by all means likely that the nearer maturity the 
child approaches, the more we may find him 
varying from the supposedly common type. In 
fact, it becomes less and less correct to speak of 
types as v^^e advance to the more mature forms. 
The type back of the adult can be only the vaguest 
and most unilluminating affair. With the child 
it represents a definite body of tendencies to act 
in certain ways that practically all children will 
possess. It would be difficult to chart variations 
from psychic norms, but curves made out for the 
physical side are interesting and are probably a 
fair index to variation in general. We adopt 
from Burk^ a curve covering 45,000 boys and 
43,000 girls. From it we see that the average 
variation from mean height increases slowly from 
5 cm. at five and one-half years to 9 cm. at fifteen 
and one-half years for boys. For girls the varia- 
tion is from 5 cm. at five and one-half to 8^ cm. 

^Vide charts at close of volume. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 213 

at twelve and one-half. After these ages varia- 
tions in height rapidly fall off, but on the psychic 
side it would now be only well begun. 

Forzvard reference of interests. — Before clos- 
ing the discussion, a word should be said in 
explanation of what is meant when we speak of 
the interests of one period preparing the way for 
those of the next. It is possible to err as seri- 
ously in regard to the forward reference of 
interests, their value in preparing for adult activi- 
ties, as it is regarding their backward reference. 

From one point of view, every spontaneous 
expression of the growing child has a teleological 
significance; that is, its full meaning comes out 
only in connection with the completer develop- 
ment of succeeding years. For such to be the 
case does not, however, render less valid the 
activities of the child for himself. The criterion 
of value for the future is necessarily one for the 
observer, one to be applied only after the evolu- 
tion has been completed, and when we can look 
back and interpret the incomplete in terms of the 
complete. It may be perfectly legitimate in 
philosophy to use such a standpoint, but for psy- 
chology the criterion must be in terms of present 
function. From this point of view we have out- 
lined the unfolding of the child's interests and 
dispositions to certain sorts of action. Each 



214 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

period of development has its own justification, 
no matter what comes before or after. If a 
period of well co-ordinated and definitely directed 
modes of expression is made possible by the half 
instinctive and impulsive activities of earlier 
years, these earlier years were not mere terms of 
preparation. Their activities are as truly ex- 
pressions of the meaning of life to the child as 
are the so-called fuller activities of later life to 
the mature individual. In the eyes of the adult 
the child's responses are very inadequate, but in 
the child's situation, with his undeveloped organ- 
ism, they may be, and undoubtedly are, as com- 
plete and adequate as are the adult's. A child is 
not an imperfect embodiment of the powers of 
the adult; neither is the child's environment the 
differentiated one of maturity. It is because the 
child and his environment are separated, and 
because into each, in its isolation, are read the 
meaning that attaches to them for maturity, that 
the childish activities and interests come to be 
regarded as merely preparations or promises of 
future efiiciency. 

And yet how shall we know, in studying any 
given point in mental development, whether the 
interaction of the various elements is really what 
it ought to be? Does this demand the bringing 
in of a criterion from a later period ? If it does, 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 215 

it in no sense lowers the validity of the period in 
question. Each stage of development is valid 
in itself, because it represents an interaction of an 
organism of a certain degree of specialization, 
with an exactly correlatively differentiated envi- 
ronment. No more than this can be said of 
even an adult period. If there were not this 
correlativity in the unfolding of organism and 
environment, then the so-called immature periods 
could be judged by external criteria and in the 
light of adult life be regarded as mere promises 
of better things. That is, if the organism were 
undeveloped, but were living in the midst of the 
same developed environment as the adult, the 
goal would be to adjust the imperfect activities 
to the given perfect environment. Thus the 
child-side of the equation would be continually 
a deficient one. Or, if both child and environ- 
ment were regarded as given in specialized and 
fully developed form, the child would still be at 
a disadvantage, for he manifestly does not under 
present conditions really get the worth of an adult 
environment. The true view is that the child 
as he is gets the ivorth of all the ivorld that he 
really has. 

The activity of the future is, of course, condi- 
tioned by the child's present activities. It would 
thus be more correct to say that the co-ordinated 



2i6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

activities of later life hark back to those of the 
immature forms, than that these point forward 
to the former. The only meaning that we can 
attach to "teleological" in referring to interests is 
that which belongs to the term in the general 
evolutionary process. The less specialized points 
to the more specialized simply because the latter 
is a development from the former. The earlier 
interests of man are not the mystic foreshadow- 
ings of what is to come, but the stuff that goes 
on differentiating until it reaches a degree of co- 
ordination and specialization that by common 
consent we call mature. There is no reason 
intrinsic in any activity at any time that labels 
it as more or less perfect, or as higher or lower 
in the scale of development. The boy does not 
form various clubs and societies with his play- 
mates so that he may be a better member of 
society, but he does become an efficient and useful 
member of society because of these youthful co- 
operations. This is in substance all we can mean 
by the "development of interests." 

Criticism of methods of studying interests. — 
No elaborate discussion or criticism of the meth- 
ods by which the preceding material has been 
gathered can be attempted. We have gone on 
the assumption that the various studies have been, 
at least in general, reliable. The interests that 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 217 

have been mentioned are, most of them, well 
recognized by all observers of children, and, 
while there may be errors in observing and inter- 
preting the facts here set forth, the general 
scheme as a whole seems fairly consistent when 
we reflect upon the great variety of sources from 
which the material has come. 

The whole subject of methodology does, how- 
ever, need a thorough investigation. The object 
of all this class of studies should be to get accurate 
data as to the child's spontaneous expressions 
and activities, with definite record as to age, sex, 
and previous life-history. Every study must be 
accompanied by a careful statement of the condi- 
tions under which the material is secured. The 
real child-psychologists are endeavoring more 
than ever before to devise tests that will eliminate 
as nearly as possible disturbing conditions; in 
other words, to gather material by laboratory 
experiments. The child cannot, of course, be 
isolated completely; the conditions cannot be 
absolutely controlled. It is questionable whether 
we should really get what we want any better 
if a test could be applied in which the conditions 
were theoretically ideal. With such compara- 
tively simple things as molecules and rays of 
light we can tell pretty accurately what to elimi- 
nate and what to preserve. But when it comes to 



2i8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

experimenting with children, how can we know 
that what we have attempted to eHminate as dis- 
turbing conditions are not really vital to truthful 
results? The child must largely be taken as he 
is. It is clear that two very different forms of 
tests may be used for the same end, one of which 
is so arranged as to bring out the precise point 
aimed at, while the other, applied under exactly 
the same circumstances, will arouse all sorts of 
disturbing elements. We recommend for careful 
study the various forms of inquiry used by Earl 
Barnes and his fellow-workers, and reported in 
the two sets of Studies in Education. They are 
interesting examples of attempts so to shape the 
tests as to give exactly the result aimed at and 
nothing more. 

Defects in studies. — As to the studies from 
which we have quoted, there is much variability 
in the degree in which they embody all necessary 
and desirable elements. One of the most serious 
defects with a large number is their failure to 
give mformation as to the subjects and the con- 
ditions of examining them. They present simply 
a mass of data that may be entirely trustworthy, 
but which is of extremely limited value for such 
a study as we have attempted. Summarizing 
the essentials of a good experiment, we should 
say, first of all, let the kind of activity to be 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 219 

studied be definitely marked out. It must then 
be noted to what extent, without creating any 
artificial conditions, it can be studied in com- 
parative isolation. Next, the test itself must be 
arranged so as to give exactly the results aimed 
at with a minimum of extraneous elements. In 
the interpretation of results it is of the utmost 
importance so to frame the rubrics under which 
the data are to be classified that the personal 
equation of the investigator shall be reduced to 
a minimum. 

Relative value of methods. — Of the methods 
actually used a few words may be said. Some 
studies can be made entirely by observation of 
children, as, for example, in their games, clubs, 
etc., and a great many lines of interest can be 
assumed by this method. Most investigators 
have, however, placed great dependence on some 
sort of vocal or written expression from the child. 
Of such expressions, two general sorts have 
usually been sought : first, those involving a cer- 
tain amount of introspection on the part of the 
child, including his direct statements as to his 
desires, likes and dislikes, or even more subjective 
information about present mental states, motives, 
etc. Answers are also sought to questions that 
do not exactly require introspection, and yet are 
aimed to throw direct light on internal attitudes. 



220 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

Secondly, such expressions of the child as draw- 
ings, compositions, and the like, arranged to 
throw indirect hght on the child's subjective 
attitudes and character. Manifestly the latter 
class of material is much more reliable if the in- 
vestigator is only skilful enough to read it aright. 
There is, of course, always the danger of finding 
in such things what is really not there, or at 
most only slightly. 

The methods that rely on the direct state- 
ments of children regarding themselves are, it 
seems to us, of questionable value, especially if 
used on children before the adolescent years. It 
would be worth while even to test carefully their 
reliability for adolescents and adults. Reminis- 
cences of interests of earlier periods, whether 
written by children or adults, are still more ques- 
tionable for anything like accurate conclusions. 
With children, for example, the tendency is 
always in recording some childish interest, such 
as playing with dolls, to locate it far back in 
infancy, even when it has been of vital concern 
to them until very lately. So with adults, it 
is certainly unsafe to rely, except in a general 
way, on the accounts they give of their childish 
interests. Not only does the average person read 
much into his early life that he has really come to 
the realization of only in later years, but he also 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 221 

cannot be expected to tell with any accuracy when 
he had certain interests, and when and how they 
culminated. Except to the trained observer, all 
the early life is apt to be read in terms of mature 
interests and attitudes. This is illustrated by the 
rarity of those people who can put themselves 
in any true sense in a child's place and appreciate 
his point of view. 

Judged by the criteria of good experiments, 
offered above, many of the articles quoted fall 
short, and yet it is worth while to bring together 
what they offer — to take account of stock, as it is. 
If it is unsatisfactory, we at least have the ground 
cleared for a new series of endeavors.^ 

^Bibliography at end of volume. 



CHAPTER XV 

ADOLESCENCE: AN INTERPRETATION 

We shall not attempt in this chapter to add 
anything to the already voluminous investiga- 
tions of this period, but rather to get at a point of 
view from which the material already collected 
can be interpreted. This is the greatest need at 
present. There are many problems of adoles- 
cence, it is true, in which there should be much 
more research, but it seems hardly wise to heap 
up more material until we have taken our bearings 
in what we already have. It is inevitable that 
the hypotheses of the pioneer students of this 
period of development should have been some- 
what superficial. In collecting a new set of facts, 
it is impossible to know which to select as the 
truly characteristic ones, and which to regard 
as the more superficial or as due to artificial 
conditions. But we have on hand now enough 
of material regarding adolescent attitudes to look 
with assurance for some principles of interpreta- 
tion. 

The period comprises the five to ten years 
immediately succeeding puberty. It may be 
characterized as primarily the time when the 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 223 

youth comes to consciousness of the sexual func- 
tions and when the chief problem of co-ordination 
is that of adjustment to the values of the social 
organism in which he lives. It is in its first 
years a period of greatly accelerated growth in 
height and weight, and this, together with the 
maturing of the sexual functions, seems to render 
it a time of great emotional instability. These 
may be taken as the fundamental facts. The prob- 
lem is to interpret the varied phenomena of the 
period in terms of these facts. What we greatly 
stand in need of at present is a reliable description 
of what may be safely regarded as normal charac- 
teristics of the average adolescent. Too often 
studies in this period have been confined to par- 
ticular classes — those, for example, living in a 
certain special environment. It is clearly im- 
proper to generalize the characteristics of such 
types before we have studied with equal care 
the adolescents who come from different sur- 
roundings. Another fault of previous studies 
is that they have tended to select striking cases 
and to ignore the average. The error here has 
been largely one unavoidably connected with the 
method of investigation most in favor. The 
special classes studied have usually been those 
from a more or less religious environment, and 
the method has largely been that of the question- 



224 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

ary. Aside from the obvious limitations that 
attach to reminiscences and to the attempts of a 
youth to answer formal questions regarding his 
present subjective attitudes, this method has other 
and even more serious objections, if it is to be 
used in establishing any adolescent norms. By 
the questionary we get returns from the more 
subjective natures, but from the objective types 
we get at the same time absolutely no informa- 
tion. Those who have striking inner experiences, 
especially in the religious line, are naturally 
intensely interested in them and are ready to 
describe them. Even after multitudes of such 
experiences have been collected, it must be admit- 
ted that there may have been as great a number 
under different environmental conditions who 
have had no subjective experiences at all compa- 
rable with the religious types and who, having 
nothing to report, simply said nothing to the ques- 
tions that in others awakened a ready response. 
We must be careful, then, about all generalizations 
as to the introspectiveness of adolescence, its times 
of storm and stress, its periods of revolt against 
all authority, its crises and sudden conversions, 
its exaltations and depressions. These states are 
no doubt characteristic of many adolescents, but 
the problem is to find how far they may be 
regarded as the normal expressions of an unfold- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 225 

ing consciousness, and how far they may be 
properly classed as induced phenomena, that is, 
as arising under special conditions. 

We can probably say with some assurance 
that adolescence tends to be a time of emotional 
instability. To those who accept the James 
theory of emotion it is quite conceivable that the 
rapid bodily changes in height and weight, and 
the maturing of the most fundamental instinct 
of the race, would be accompanied by a certain 
lack of equilibrium in emotional attitudes. 
Whether this instability results in the actual 
emotionalism of the various types usually cited 
depends entirely on the temperament of the youth 
and the influence of surroundings, particularly 
the latter. There are some situations peculiarly 
suited to arouse and sustain violent emotional 
excesses, and others in which every force to which 
the youth is subjected tends to turn his mind 
from himself and afford him abundant opportu- 
nity for expending his surplus energy in overt 
channels instead of turning it in upon himself. 

There is no doubt that this is a time in which 
the relationship of the youth to others rapidly 
acquires new meaning, a time for the rapid 
realization of social and self-values. It is likely 
that the values and the proper adjustments 
toward them are felt before there is proportionate 



226 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

development of ability to make the adjustments. 
It is not strange, then, in proportion as the dis- 
parity between the self and its realized duties is 
felt, that feelings of maladjustment should arise 
and that they should easily be exaggerated by 
an unsympathetic environment. 

It is also likely that, with the exuberance of 
growth, the rapid unfolding of a consciousness of 
social ends, and the first realization of the possi- 
bilities in life that lie before one who is full of 
zeal and energy, erratic tendencies of various 
kinds would easily arise, and that these, if too 
sternly checked, would often break out into the 
"storm and stress" about which we hear so much. 
This is by no means as common a characteristic 
of adolescence as has been thought. It appears 
usually among those who have been" raised in a 
narrow dogmatism, against which, in the presence 
of the newly realized freer life, if the youth 
possesses any energy and native force of charac- 
ter whatever, there must inevitably be a reaction. 

The religious feelings at this period are apt 
to assume in some a striking prominence. It is 
not strange that the vague feeling of many great 
possibilities lying before and the sense of malad- 
justment to the conditions of the pi-esent should 
play directly into the hands of religion, especially 
if there are elements in the environment that 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 227 

tend to suggest such interpretations to the youth. 
If social pressure happens to crystalHze in this 
particular direction, almost every vague feeling 
or attitude of mind that is not easily interpreted, 
or is not organized with the rest of the experi- 
ence, will be interpreted on the religious side. 
Religion, so to speak, picks up the unorganized 
tendencies and feelings, and gives them whatever 
meaning and organization it may choose. From 
the standpoint of its organizing influence, it is 
to a certain extent beneficial in its effects. As 
much, however, cannot be said of it in so far as 
it promotes introspection and self-analysis, or 
tends to bring prematurely to consciousness tend- 
encies that would normally ripen later. 

It seems to be true that all relatively unorgan- 
ized forms of experience are peculiarly open to 
suggestion. The lack of coherency among the 
ideas and systems of ideas in such a mind renders 
them easy prey to influences of all kinds coming 
from without. The chaotic character of the 
adolescent's mental systems with reference to the 
broader social relationships makes him particu- 
larly suggestible in every question of social con- 
duct and the organization of his action with 
reference to the broader problems of life. This 
condition of suggestibility is entirely analogous 
to that of the child, especially under the age of 



228 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

six or seven. Here also we have an experience 
without definite organization, bewildered by its 
sudden emergence from a world of activities into 
one of things and ends, offering almost indefinite 
possibilities of manipulation. This period in the 
child is marked by extreme readiness to be 
influenced, in the simplest opinions and acts, by 
the mood and conduct of others. He may be said 
to be hypersensitive to all means offered by his 
environment for the defining and emphasizing 
of his experience. The adolescent has the same 
need for definition, but upon a higher plane, and 
he may he said to he hypersensitive to all forms 
of social suggestion. K this is true, there is 
indefinite possibility for variations in adolescent 
characteristics. Whether there are experiences 
of storm and stress, times of sudden awakening 
to hitherto unrealized values, or merely a gradual ' 
and harmonious unfolding of the new mental 
attitudes, depends as much on the character of 
the environment in which the youth lives as upon 
himself. 

The frequency of conversions at this time in 
the evangelical churches has led many to regard 
it as a normal adolescent phenomenon. Both 
Starbuck^ and Coe,^ however, find that there are 

^Psychology of Religion. Scribner. 

^The Spiritual Life. Methodist Book Concern. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 229 

many individuals in the churches who have never 
had these "sudden awakenings." Their rehgious 
hfe has unfolded gradually. Dr. Coe finds that 
such tend to be less suggestible than those having 
the striking "experiences." All this points 
strongly to the view that development during the 
adolescent period should be a gradual unfolding, 
and that where breaks occur they have been 
forced by social pressure in some form; that is, 
certain vague impulses are forcibly given some 
special direction by social suggestion. Such a 
forced crystallization of impulse is apt to be 
accompanied by a somewhat severe emotional up- 
heaval and a consequent increase in introspective 
tendencies. While it is by all means desirable 
that social influences should give direction and 
meaning to the impulses of this period, it is not 
desirable that they should be premature in their 
operation. There is great danger in a too early 
centering of the deeper impulses in certain chan- 
nels. A prolonged adolescence is as desirable as 
a prolonged infancy, that there be an adequate 
growth in every line before the specializations 
of later life. 

It is questionable, therefore, whether in early 
adolescence strong social pressure should ever be 
brought to bear upon the youth in any one direc- 
tion. The most normal development will be 



230 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

attained by letting him live in the midst of a 
society occupied with its customary functions. 
Such a situation will furnish ample suggestion 
for the defining of experience when the proper 
moments come for its definition, and it will be 
more likely to take a natural and healthful direc- 
tion than if an attempt is made earlier to center 
its elements in some exclusive channel, such as 
the religious. Wherever suggestion is strong 
enough, we find many instances of sudden awak- 
enings in other spheres than the religious. The 
reason for their being relatively so abundant in 
the religious sphere is because there a tremendous 
pressure is usually brought upon all within reach 
of such influences. All sorts of vague and unde- 
fined impulses are seized upon by the church and 
interpreted from a religious standpoint. How 
artificial a religion so produced is apt to be is 
proved by the fact that with a few more years of 
growth the youth often becomes conscious of the 
real significance of what he had before interpreted 
from a religious point of view. Thus too often 
in later life religion itself is rejected as a mere 
adolescent phenomenon. It is condemned be- 
cause the particular form into which the experi- 
ence was forced was artificial and meaningless. 
In saying this we are far from denying to adoles- 
cence depth of character and genuine religious 
convictions. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 231 

As regards the general tendency of the adoles- 
cent to develop by starts, to have sudden awaken- 
ings to hitherto unappreciated values, we find 
evidences in various directions. Many boys and 
girls then first become suddenly conscious of 
the meaning of certain studies. After long 
periods of grinding in mathematics, language, 
literature, music, etc., the subjects suddenly clear 
up. We have instances of rapid changes from 
a pessimistic to an optimistic attitude, clearly 
attributable to a simple social suggestion. There 
are many cases of the sudden appearance of the 
social consciousness. One young man who had 
been unusually cruel to animals in his boyhood 
suddenly lost all desire to be cruel by the reading 
of Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is an excellent 
illustration of how an attitude that is already 
probably almost outgrown may be suddenly cast 
aside under the influence of some strong sugges- 
tion.^ 

The rather dogmatic conclusion from this dis- 
cussion is that the adolescent is far better off if 
his equilibrium can be sustained by social sugges- 
tion rather than overturned by it. It is likely 
that a certain amount of introspection is normal, 

^This paragraph gives a very summary treatment of a 
topic on which I have collected a good deal of original material 
and which I hope to treat adequately in a work in preparation 
on the Psychology of the Religious Consciousness. 



232 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

but it may easily assume abnormal phases. Much 
despondency and so-called sense of sin is no 
doubt due to purely physical causes. The ideal 
surroundings for the adolescent are those that 
are especially cheerful in tone and that furnish 
the stimulus to abundant and vigorous physical 
exercise. He should have his attention turned 
outwardly as much as possible, cultivating inter- 
ests in active, overt enterprises with other people, 
and avoiding the giving of attention to his own 
physical and mental states. A perfectly normal 
impulse that appears here definitely for the first 
time, namely, the altruistic, or desire to help 
others, may afford a good channel for diverting 
attention from one's own states. 

The points in this chapter are all of the 
greatest importance to the teacher. Particularly 
should she endeavor to emphasize the youth's 
active interests, and, by every means in her power, 
study to furnish normal and helpful suggestions 
that will gradually define his vague impulses after 
social values. If the unbounded enthusiasm of 
this period can be co-ordinated with useful lines 
of work and investigation, it continues to be a 
wellspring of energy throughout life. If, how- 
ever, it fails in the time of its aspiration to get 
a definite and satisfactory expression, it only too 
easily evaporates, leaving the youth in a dull, 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 233 

prosaic world, disappointed at the unreality of his 
dreams and without the desire to try again. To 
how many is the enthusiasm of adolescence only 
a dream! Let the teacher remember, then, that 
the bent given in these years to the emotions 
and habits of mind is likely to be permanent; 
and happy is that teacher who can do something 
toward rendering permanent in her boys and 
girls the freshness and elasticity of this spring- 
time of life. 



CHAPTER XVI 

EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS 

We can here attempt to point out only a few of 
the practical implications of the view of mental 
development here presented. Let us first note its 
significance in the teacher's preparation for work. 

Every theory of mental processes must have 
some relation to the work, but the type of theory 
most needed is the one that will give her the 
clearest practical understanding of the minds 
with which she deals and of the nature of the 
educative process in which she is working with 
them as their teacher. All our theories are 
largely the outgrowth of practical conditions. 
We construct them to fit the necessities of 
practice as we conceive them. It is thus inevi- 
table that the various types of educational 
doctrine will tend to have their appropriate inter- 
pretations of the mental life. But not entirely 
so, for while educational practice is constantly in 
process of reconstruction, it too often happens 
that the basis on which the practice rests is less 
yielding. A theory once constructed is not as 
readily susceptible to change as are practical 
attitudes. Hence it is that, while educational 
234 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 235 

thought has made great strides in recent years, the 
psychology underlying the teaching process has 
remained largely of an older type. At any rate, 
it has never been thoroughly reconstructed. 

The type of psychology here presented, it is 
believed, is implied in the best educational theory 
of today, but the kind of psychology in which we 
train our teachers belongs to an educational atti- 
tude that we are fast leaving behind. In the 
first chapter we criticised the idea that the psy- 
chology of the adult mind was adequate for the 
needs of the teacher of children. We do not, of 
course, mean to imply that a thorough under- 
standing of adult mental processes is not neces- 
sarily preliminary to the proper appreciation of 
the mental life of the child, but that it should be 
studied as a preparation for the psychology of 
the child, which more intimately concerns the 
teacher. The need we here emphasize is, of 
course, felt, and is usually met by a little child- 
study. But this has always remained more or 
less empirical and decidedly subsidiary to the 
more serious psychology. It has fallen into dis- 
repute because it is so ill-organized that it really 
seems to give pedagogic students little that is 
tangible and fundamental. 

We have assumed in the preceding chapters 
that the best preliminary step toward arousing 



236 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

a permanent interest in the psychology of the 
child would be to present it in an organized and 
consistent form. We have avoided making our 
pages encyclopaedic resumes of innumerable 
"facts," trying rather to outline the method of 
development and the meaning, in terms of the 
child's own consciousness, of what he does, and 
sees, and feels. 

It is recognized, of course, that no psychology 
of individual development is an adequate basis 
for educational theory; but it is believed that 
the psychology that interprets the growth of 
mental processes, and that with reference to their 
place in the individual's entire experience with 
all its social activities and interactions, is more 
really what is needed by the teacher than a 
description of mental contents as existences in 
and of themselves. 

Educational psychology is essentially a social 
psychology, the psychology of the interaction of 
mind with mind. It will surely be an advance 
toward such a conception of mental life to try to 
understand, in terms of his entire life, whatever 
the child does and thinks. That is the more 
adequately we can determine the character of 
the child's experience, the nature of his own point 
of view, what things mean to him, so much the 
more adequately can our minds interact with his 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 237 

in the educative process. This sort of a state- 
ment of mental development is a necessary step 
toward the psychology of the interplay of minds 
that the teacher must some day study. The 
full meaning of a single individual's experience 
cannot be stated except in terms of his inter- 
actions with others. Hence every attempt to 
interpret the child, to find what his activities 
mean to him, gives us a better knowledge of the 
personalities involved in the interaction of mind 
with mind, and hence prepares the way for a 
valuable social, and at the same time educational, 
psychology. 

The type of educational theory in which a 
training in adult psychology is deemed sufficient 
for the teacher lays the emphasis on the transfer 
of knowledge rather than on the enrichment of 
experience. Since, as it is conceived, it is the 
teacher's business to mediate the transfer of cer- 
tain quantities of knowledge to the child, she 
must know the machinery by which it can be 
acquired. Hence great stress is laid on a clear 
understanding of such processes as perception, 
memory, imagination, reasoning, etc., while the 
other forms of mental activity are relatively neg- 
lected. The intellectual functions are studied 
because, as it is conceived, by knowing the laws 
of their working, the process of knowledge trans- 



238 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

fer can be facilitated and its results made more 
permanent. Naturally, with such a conception 
of the educative process, the best psychology for 
the teacher would be that which described these 
"mental fingers" in their state of greatest perfec- 
tion in certain types of adult consciousness. 
Such an attitude tends to set up mental functions, 
or "faculties," as they should more properly be 
called on such a theory, as existing in and of 
themselves. 

Herbart's five formal steps ^ in the learning 
process furnish a good illustration of this attitude. 
They are conceived as the necessary steps in the 
acquisition of knowledge, and the teacher studies 
them in every form and aspect, because it is her 
task "to convey information" and it is of vital 
importance that she know the steps in such 
a process. The theory of the formal steps is 
an advance beyond the theory of faculties for 
obtaining knowledge, in that it recognizes that 
the obtaining of knowledge is a process of devel- 
opment. Ultimately, however, it is really very 
little different from the older theory. It tends 
to crystallize all the aspects of experience around 
a process of getting knowledge, which is still 
conceived as of primary importance. It is just 
because the growth of experience is not synony- 

^For an explanation of these formal steps see McMurry's 
Method of the Recitation. Macmillan Co., 1902. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 239 

mous with the acquisition of knowledge that these 
five formal steps do not themselves represent the 
true process of obtaining knowledge. No theory 
of experience can be completely expressed in 
terms of the knowledge-process. 

This is not the place to criticise in detail this 
particular aspect of the Herbartian doctrine. It 
is sufficient to say that the steps are a retrospective 
analysis of the development of experience based 
on the assumption of its being a process of acquir- 
ing knowledge. It assumes, on the one hand, that 
the child is equipped with a differentiated experi- 
ence, that is, with a set of intellectual tools; and, 
on the other hand, that there is a mass of informa- 
tion that the child more or less consciously realizes 
that he is to put forth effort to obtain. The five 
formal steps are conceived as the stages in the 
transformation of this external knowledge by 
means of the intellectual tools. There is no de- 
velopment of experience emphasized by such a 
theory. What it assumes is simply a developed 
experience giving itself content by taking in 
knowledge. The existence of the mental tools 
has no organic relation to the process of getting 
knowledge. They were there before the process 
began, and they continue to exist after it is ended. 
This ignores the functional relation between the 
processes of experience and its development, or 



240 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

differentiation. It admits that they further the 
development of experience, but it does not account 
for them in terms of this process of development. 

To take a specific point, we may say that there 
is, in a developing consciousness, really no such 
thing as a presentation of new material, as is 
assumed by Herbart. Such a description is from 
the observer's standpoint exclusively. The point 
of contact between the new and the old is never 
thus drawn in the child's own experience. For 
the child the point of growth is the point of stress 
in an old experience found to be inadequate in 
a new situation. The new does not come as 
something new, but as a means for defining and 
rendering more adequate the old experience. 

In fine, Herbart's steps are the result of a 
logical analysis of the framework of knowledge. 
They do not express what the obtaining of knowl- 
edge means in the child's experience. We hold 
that each step in the process of definition must be 
stated with reference to its possible meaning to 
the child at the time of its occurrence. We do 
not have a differentiated experience, on the one 
hand, and a recognized body of values, or knowl- 
edge, on the other, but rather simply an undiffer- 
entiated experience and an impulse to define it. 
The undifferentiated experience includes both the 
child with his unorganized consciousness and the 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 241 

environment with its unrealized values. The 
Herbartian scheme is false for the child, and the 
only type of experience in which it even approxi- 
mates the truth is the one in which the division 
of mental labor has been thoroughly carried out, 
as in the case of the mature scientific student. 
Even here, however, its application is question- 
able. 

This adult psychology is also the logical 
groundwork for a theory of education in which 
the aim is the harmonious development of the 
capacities of the child. If such is the true aim 
of education, one of the essentials in the teacher's 
training is to get a good conception of the various 
mental capacities in their most complete develop- 
ment. For such, she manifestly must go to the 
psychology of the mature consciousness. Even 
if it is said that the aim is the all-around develop- 
ment of the individual, the emphasis seemingly 
being laid on no special faculties, the tendency 
is still almost inevitable to give the aim concrete 
detail by breaking the individual up into special 
powers. That is to say, there is really no way 
to tell what an all-around development of the indi- 
vidual is except in terms of his activity, which 
must itself be analyzed either in terms of itself 
or in terms of the situation in which it occurs. 
If the first alternative is chosen, the tendency is 



242 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

to break it up into powers, or faculties. The 
other alternative seems to be the only one by 
which we can avoid such a procedure, and in 
taking this alternative we are to all intents and 
purposes rejecting our definition of education as 
an all-around development. 

The acquisition of knowledge is only one 
aspect of a broader process. Hence it cannot be 
stated in itself, but only with reference to its 
setting, or meaning in this whole of experience. 
By failing to recognize this fact the older theory 
of education confined the teacher's interest in 
experience to that special modification of it that 
arises only under certain conditions. We thus 
expect the description of the specialized mental 
mechanism of the adult to meet the teacher's 
requirement for psychology. Let us try to think 
what questions a teacher needs to ask about her 
pupils. One of them surely is : What can or 
does this, that we are doing, mean to these chil- 
dren? When and why do my children reason, 
remember, etc. ? The questions are not so much 
those regarding zvhat the processes are by which 
knowledge is acquired, as under what circum- 
stances do these processes begin to operate and 
what function do they serve in the continuation 
of experience. To ask these questions shifts the 
center of interest from specialized aspects of con- 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 243 

sciousness to experience as a whole. It is upon 
the nature of experience in its entirety, the way 
in which it unfolds, and its connection with the 
necessities of action that a true theory of educa- 
tion must be based. The psychological bases of 
such a theory must be functional. For solving 
immediate problems the teacher has no special 
interest in knowing what the mental contents are, 
or even how they work. When they are present 
they work without any assistance from her. 
According to the functional psychology their very 
presence means, by definition, that they are doing 
something. Too often the teacher thinks of them 
as always present, but not always necessarily 
active. From the point of view here presented 
her most vital concern is to know under what 
circumstances they arise and what part they play 
in promoting further experience, because it is 
here she exerts her greatest influence as a teacher. 
We now turn to the immediate pedagogical 
bearings of our genetic treatment of experience. 
There are two points that have come out in the 
body of our discussion, about which it will be 
convenient to center our practical deductions. 
About these two points the whole psychology of 
elementary education, in particular, centers. The 
first point is the undifferentiated character of the 
child's experience. The second is the imperfect 



244 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

organization of his experience with reference to 
the social whole within which he lives. In other 
words, the first point gives us the organization 
of the child; the second, the organization of his 
world. 

There is a third point of great importance, but 
it is one common to the psychology of the adult 
as well as that of the child. It is this : Differ- 
entiations in experience occur with reference to 
the necessities of action. This has been one of 
our most fundamental propositions, but it is not 
a deduction from child-psychology alone. The 
modifications of adult experience occur after the 
same fashion, and it is from this point of view 
that we have maintained that adult psychology 
should be studied. But the first two points are 
the pre-eminent contributions of genetic psychol- 
ogy to elementary school work. In the case of 
even the third point there is this important differ- 
ence between the child and the adult : The latter, 
in defining his experience in any special direction, 
has as a base of supplies a previously well- 
organized experience. This makes his readjust- 
ment of himself in a difficulty or his a^/justment 
of himself to novel situations a comparatively 
easy matter. The child has no such organized 
background to work from; hence his progress 
is slower than that of a mature mind, and his 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 245 

activities are modified because of this lack of an 
organization in other directions as well as in the 
particular one in which he is striving. Hence, 
even this third point must be taken up in the 
case of the child as well as in that of the adult. 
This fundamental principle of all development 
of mind is really the more general statement of 
the first two points mentioned as the specific con- 
tribution of genetic psychology to the work of 
the teacher. They may be said to be the conse- 
quences of the fact that experience differentiates 
as a function of activity. The third point, which 
states the general principle of all mental growth, 
involves these two specific problems, or takes these 
two specific aspects when it is applied to the child. 

As we have said, the nature of the process of 
education depends upon the nature of experience ; 
that is, upon the nature of the mind to be edu- 
cated, its method of growth, and its relation to 
the world. It is more than a mere transfer of 
knowledge from one mind to another. It is a 
process that goes on through any influence that 
specializes the child's reactions and differentiates 
his world, and that at the same time increases 
his control over his own development. 

Let us turn now to a few specific conclusions. 
The process of defining experience in the child 
must be through entire reactions. If it is ever 



246 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

allowable to speak of training the memory, the 
feelings, the will, in an adult, it is scarcely so in 
the child. If we do so, we must at least remem- 
ber that our statement is an abstraction without 
the meaning in the child's experience that it has 
in the adult's. Our discussion has emphasized 
the fact that the child reacts as a whole, and any 
theory of training, in isolation, his senses or his 
motor centers, for example, is a one-sided one 
simply because the child does not grow in that 
way. It may be that attempts at training, based 
on such a theory, have their effect, but it is a 
distorted one and not real development. What- 
ever the child really gets comes to him in a setting 
of activity, and it means, not merely an increase 
in intellectual or emotional or motor ability, but 
an increase in all combined. 

The mental processes are inextricably com- 
bined with one another and normally develop only 
in conjunction with the increasing complexity of 
overt action. If there is apparent growth in 
perception without a concomitant or subsequent 
development of the other processes and a corre- 
spondingly increased efficiency in action, we may 
always be sure that there is little real value in 
the supposed growth. The very fact of its stand- 
ing by itself, out of definite co-ordination with the 
rest of the processes of experience, deprives it of 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 247 

all means of being of service to the child. The 
only value any function can possibly have must 
be worked out in a common process. Since 
the normal growth of any one element of con- 
sciousness is necessarily co-ordinated with that of 
other elements, we can see that not only is an 
element left in the air, if developed by itself, but 
also that it simply cannot become in its isolation 
what it would in its natural setting. 

As the child advances through the school 
years, it becomes increasingly possible to develop 
certain aspects of his experience to the apparent 
exclusion of others. It, however, is only because 
his experience has become so complex that there 
is this seeming isolation in its development. It 
really holds here, as in the earlier years, that 
intellectual or emotional growth, to be of a ser- 
viceable nature, must in the end react on other 
aspects of experience, and every scheme of educa- 
tion must provide for the easy transition from the 
school studies to the demands of practical life. 

The second specific, practical bearing of our 
discussion is one that arises from the changing 
organization of the child's world. This has been 
well illustrated in the chapters on interests. A 
thorough understanding of the development of 
the child's world is a prime essential to any 
scheme of education. In a world of a given 



248 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

degree of organization the child has correspond- 
ing functional adjustments to make. For a 
teacher who has some appreciation of this fact 
the problem of how to awaken the child's interests 
ceases to be ominous. He already has interests; 
they lie in the lines of activity that are function- 
ally connected with his stage of growth. The 
real problem is not how to arouse his interests, 
but how to utilize them. Only as this problem is 
properly met can the activity of one period make 
adequate preparation for the activity of the next. 
Each period has its peculiar problems of adjust- 
ment; and the influences that are most helpful, 
or the most educative, to the child are those that 
help him define himself with reference to the 
problems of his various periods of growth. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHILDREN'S INTERESTS 

PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PHYLOGENETIC ASPECTS 
OF INTERESTS 

Bryan, "Nascent Stages and Their Pedagogical Signifi- 
cance," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VII, p. 357. 
A discussion of the stages of growth, with their mental 
and physical correlates. 

Dawson, "Children's Interest in the Bible," ibid., p. 151. 
The introduction contains a good summary of the bio- 
logical bases of interest. 

Scott, "Psychology of Puberty and Adolescence," 
A''. E. A. Proceedings, 1897, p. 843. 
Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion. 
In this volume we have the best convenient summary 
of the various physical and psychic factors involved in 
adolescent attitudes. 

Barnes, "Feelings of Sex in Children," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. II, p. 199. 

O'Shea, "Discussion on Child's Physical Development," 
N. E. A. Proceedings, 1897, p. 841. 
Kline, "Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct," 
Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. V, p. 381. 
Chamberlain, The Child: A Study in the Evolution 
of Man. 

See especially chap, iv, on "Periods of Development." 
Guillet, "Recapitulation and Education," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. VII, p. 897. 

Note. — It is not our purpose to give any adequate biblio- 
graphy of this aspect of the problem, but rather to men- 
tion a few representative works. 
249 



250 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

II. children's interests in general; theo- 
retical AND experimental STUDIES 

1. Luckey, "Practical Results Obtained through the Study 
of Children's Interests," A''. E. A. Proceedings, 1897, 
p. 284. 

2. O'Shea, "Interests in Childhood," Child Study Monthly, 
Vol. II, p. 266. 

A discriminating introductory study. Interpretation of 
an investigation made by means of essays, pictures, 
games, etc. 

3. Binet, Revue philosophique, December, 1890. 

4. Barnes, "A Study of Children's Interests," Studies in 
Education, Vol. I, p. 203. 

5. Shaw, "A Comparative Study of Children's Interests," 
Child Study Monthly, Vol. II, p. 152. 

Nos. 3, 4, and 5 are companion studies, and should be 
read together. 

6. Taylor, "Practical Aspects of Interests," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. V, p. 497. 

Tests of interest in various studies. 

7. "Children's Interests," Northwestern Monthly, Vol. VI, 
pp. 67, 96, 133, 156, 221, 245, 306, 335- 

8. St. John, "Children's Interests," Child Study Monthly, 
Vol. Ill, p. 284. 

9. Calkins, "Emotional Life of Children," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. Ill, p. 319. 

Gives tables of likes and dislikes, preferences, reasons 
for, etc., for different ages. 

10. Hancock, "Mental Differences of School Children," 
N. E. A. Proceedings, 1897, p. 851. 

11. Frear, "Imitation," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. IV, 
p. 382. 

12. Laing, "An Inductive Study of Interest," Educational 
Review, Vol. XVI, p. 381. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 251 

13. Griffith, "Interest from the Child Study Point of View," 
Child Study Monthly, Vol. IV, p. 285. 

III. SPECIFIC LINES OF INTEREST 

1. Dawson, "Children's Interest in the Bible," Peda- 
gogical Seminary, Vol. VII, p. 151. 

2. Manson, "Children's Interests in Nature and Myth 
Literature," Child Study Monthly, Vol. II, pp. 40-43. 

3. Brewer, "Instinctive Interest of Children in Bear and 
Wolf Stories," Proceedings of the American Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Science, 1894, Vol. XLII. 

4. Davis, "Interest in Causal Idea," Child Study Monthly, 
Vol. II, p. 226. 

5. Ward, "Geographic Interests of Children," Education, 
Vol. XVIII, p. 235. 

6. Barnes, "Interest in History," Studies in Education, 
p. 83. 

7. "Interest in Music," Journal of Pedagogy, Vol. XI, 
p. 265. 

8. Lawrence, "Interest in Literature," N. E. A. Proceed- 
ings, 1899, p. 1044. 

9. Wissler, "Interests of Children in Reading Work." 
Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. V, p. 523. 

A report on a questionnaire as to lessons children remem- 
bered best. 

10. J. C. Shaw, "Test of Memory in School Children," 
ibid., Vol. IV, p. 61. 

Gives tables of parts of story remembered by different 
grades. 

11. Eaton, "Children's Stories," ibid.. Vol. Ill, p. 334. 
Subjects classified with reference to age, sex, etc. 

12. Henderson, "Report on Child Reading," Annual Re- 
port, New York Department of Public Instruction, 
1897, pp. 98-111. 



252 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

13. "A Study in the Teacher's Influence," Pedagogical 
Seminary, Vol. VII, p. 492. 

14. Wissler, "Pupil's Interest as Influenced by the 
Teacher," Child Study Monthly, Vol. IV, p. 138. 

15. Play interests: 

a) Hall, "The Story of a Sand Pile," Scribner's Maga- 
zine, Vol. Ill, p. 690. 

b) Gulick, "Some Aspects of Physical Exercise," 
Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LII, p. 793-808. 

c) Gulick, "Psychological, Pedagogical and Religious 
Aspects of Group Games," Pedagogical Seminary, 
Vol. VI, p. 134- 

d) Croswell, "Amusements of Worcester School Chil- 
dren," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VI, p. 314. 

e) McGhee, "The Play of Some S. C. Children," 
ibid., Vol. VII, p. 459. 

f) Streat, "Study in Moral Education," ibid.. Vol. V, 
p. 4. 

Gives details of games that interested children. 

g) Pollock, "The Ideal Play for the Kindergarten," 
N. E. A., 1898, p. 604. 

h) Sheldon, "Institutional Activities of American 
Children," American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 
IX. 

t) "Rudimentary Societies among Boys," Johns Hop- 
kins University Studies, No. XI, 2d series, 1884. 

16. Children's interests as shown in drawing and art : 

a) Lukens, "A Study of Children's Drawings in the 
Early Years," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. IV, p. 79. 
What they draw to please themselves, e. g., human 
figures, plants, animals, etc. 

b) Barnes, "Art of Little Children," ibid., Vol. Ill, 
p. 302. 

See especially pp. 394-96, an account of children's 
decorations giving insight into interests. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 253 

c) O'Shea, "Children's Expression through Drawing," 
N. E. A., 1894, p. 1015. 

d) Lukens, "Children's Drawings," ibid., 1899, P- 946. 

e) Ball, "Problems in Artistic Rendering," ibid., 
p. 940. 

/) Barnes, "Children's Drawings," Studies in Educa- 
tion, Vols. I and II. A number of articles. 
Gives classified fac-similes and comments. A yaluable 
study. 

g) Clark, "The Child's Attitude toward Perspective 
Problems," Barnes's Studies in Education, Vol. I, 
p. 283. 
17. Children's interests as seen in their aspirations: 

0) Thurber, "Plan for Study of Children's Hopes," 
Report of State Superintendent of New York for 
Year 1896, Vol. II, p. 987. 

&) Taylor, "A Preliminary Study of Children's 
Hopes," ibid. See also Eggleston. 
Follows above article. 

c) Monroe, "Vocational Interests," Education, Vol. 
XVIII, p. 259. 

d) Jegi, "Children's Ambitions," Transactions of Illi- 
nois Society for Child Study, Vol. Ill, p. 131. 

e) Thurber, "What Children Want to Do When They 
Are Men and Women," A^. E. A., 1896, p. 882. 
Published also in the Transactions of the Illinois 
Society for Child Study, Vol. II, pp. 41-46. 

f) Chandler, "Children's Purposes," Child Study 
Monthly, Vol. Ill, p. 130. 

g) Darrah-Dyke, "Children's Ideals," Popular Science 
Monthly, May, 1898. 

h) Barnes, "Children's Ideals," Pedagogical Seminary, 
Vol. VII, pp. 3-12. 



254 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

Barnes's studies are further reported in Studies in 
Education, Vol. II. 
Willard, "Children's Ambitions," Studies in Edu- 
cation, Vol. I, p. 234. 

18. Children's interests in nature study: 

o) Hoyt, "Children's Love of Nature," N. E. A., 1894, 
p. lOIO. 

b) Dolivar, "Nature Study for the Graded Schools," 
ibid., 1900, p. 600. 

c) Stone, "Relation of Nature Study to Drawing in 
Public Schools," ibid., p. 524. 

d) Lange, "Nature Study in Public Schools," ibid., 
p. 404. 

19. Chalmers, "Studies in Imagination," Pedagogical Sem- 
inary, Vol. VII, p. III. 

Contains details of interest in dolls, stories, etc. 

20. Burnham, "Individual Differences in the Imagination 
of Children," ibid.. Vol. II, p. 204. 

Suggestions as to the differences in types of interest due 
to various types of imagery. 

21. Sully, "Age of Imagination," Popular Science Monthly, 
Vol. XLV, p. 323- 

22. Sully, "The Questioning Age," ibid., pp. 733 and 577. 
These two are reprinted in Sully, Studies of Childhood. 

23. Steier, "The Curiosity of Little Children," Child Study 
Monthly, Vol. II, p. 694. 

24. G. Stanley Hall, "Study of Dolls," Pedagogical Semi- 
nary, Vol. IV, p. 129. 

25. Hall, "Children's Lies," American Journal of Psychol- 
ogy, Vol. Ill, p. 59. 

26. Hall, "The Contents of Children's Minds on Entering 
School," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. I, p. 139. 

27. Hall, "Notes on Study of Infants," ibid., Vol. I, p. 127. 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 255 

28. Brown, "Records on the Thoughts and Reasonings of 
Children," ibid., p. 358. 

29. Yoder, "Boyhood of Great Men," ibid.j Vol. Ill, p. 150. 
The section beginning at top of p. 150 gives characteristic 
traits of the youth of some noted characters — bearing on 
their interests. Cf. with interests of the average child. 

30. Burk, "The Collecting Instinct," ibid., Vol. VII, p. 179. 
Summary on p. 204 gives insight into character of inter- 
ests of children. 

31. "The Continued Story," American Journal of Psy- 
chology, Vol. VII, p. 86. 

32. Lindley, "A Study of Puzzles," ibid.. Vol. VIII, pp. 

431-93- 

Suggestions as to the ranges of association and memory 
that children have available for such tests as puzzles. 
Impressed by outlines, details escape them. 

33. M. S. Barnes, "The Historic Sense among Children," 
Studies in Education, Vol. I, pp. 43 fif. 

34. Vostrovsky, "A Study in Children's Superstitions," 
ibid., p. 123. 

35. Barnes, "Theological Life of a California Child," Peda- 
gogical Seminary, Vol. II. 

IV. PSYCHOLOGY OF INTEREST 
It is not necessary to give detailed references here. 
The Psychologies all contain discussions on the theoretical 
side. The best single discussion is : 

J. Dewey, "Interest as Related to Will," Second Sup- 
plement to tlie Herbart Yearbook, 1895. 



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Chart I. — Ratios of life-intensity or resistance to disease. 
Vertical lines represent ages ; horizontal lines, the ratio of 
those living to those dying ; solid line, boys ; dotted line, girls. 
(Adapted from Burk's monograph on Growth of Children in 
Height and Weight.) 



CHILD DEVELOPMENT 



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NuiTibers at top refer to ages ; those at side, to percentages ; 
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258 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 



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INDEX 

Acquisition of knowledge : psychological rather than 
logical, 238 f. ; a phase in the development of experi- 
ence, 24:2. 

Activities: Preyer's classification of, 21; discussion of 
same, 21 ; all alike in being responses to stimuli, 22 ; 
inhibition and activity, 1 11 f . ; relation of, to conscious- 
ness, 30 f . ; relation of, to interests, 155 f. 

Adolescence : physical characteristics, 223 ; necessity of an 
interpretative study, 222 ; characteristic errors of current 
adolescent studies, 223 ; emotional instability of, 225 ; 
causes of its so-called storm and stress, 225 f. ; religious 
tendencies of, 226 ; suggestibility of, 227 f. ; pedagogical 
inferences, 232. 

Ambitions: (see Aspirations). 

Animals : fright of children at, 57. 

Aspirations: at six and seven, 179; in second period of 
childhood, 186, 189, 193, 197 f., 199, 202, 208. 

Astonishment, 64. 

Attention: character of, in children, 177. 

Baldwin, J. M. : quoted, 16, 18; referred to, 39; on sym- 
pathy, 66 f . ; on imitation, 117, 124; quoted, 120; per- 
sistent imitation, 128 f. 

Barnes, Earl: referred to, 141; on childish cruelty, 151; 
collections of children, 179; biographical interests of 
children, 183; children's drawings, 190; children's 
ideals, 199 f . ; methods of child-study, 218. 

Barnes, Mary Sheldon : development of the historical 
sense, 187. 

Bible: interest in, 194. 

Brain: growth of, referred to, 177. 

Bryan: characteristics of second period of childhood, 182 f., 
188. 

BuRK : collecting instinct in childhood, 179, 195. 
Burk : physical development of child, 188; variations from 
average in physical development, 212. 

259 



26o INDEX 

Calkins, Mary: referred to, 36, 116 note; quoted, 39, 40, 
41, 44. 

Chamberlain, A. F. : referred to, 172 note, \tt, 183. 

Childhood: first period of, 172. 

Choice, 103. 

Clark: children's drawings, 190. 

Clubs, 194, 203. 

CoE, George A. : adolescent conversions, 228 f. 

Collecting instinct, 179, 186, 195, 197. 

Consciousness of child: first appearance hypothetical, 20, 
30, 37 ; connection of, with activity, 21 ; primary prob- 
lems of, 28 f. ; relation of, to growth of activity, 32, 
36, 37 ; unity of consciousness, 33, 34, 36, zi \ con- 
sciousness of self, 38, 185; eject theory of, 40; social 
consciousness, 131. 

Context : importance of, in psychology, 90 f. 

"Control": relation of, to volition, 104. 

Co-operative games : beginning of, 192 ; development of, 
202. 

Creeping: development of, 91. 

Crosswell: on games, 178, 188. 

Crying : its non-emotional character at first, 46, 59 ; Preyer 

on significance of crying, 50. 
Culture-epoch theory : from functional point of view, 

157 f. 

Darrah-Dyke : ideals, 199. 

Darwin: on expression of emotion, 51; on recapitulation, 

160. 
Dawson : classification of interests, 168 ; children's interest 

in Bible, 194 f. 
Deception: attitude of children toward, 143. 
Dewey, John: quoted, 8 f., 35 f., 103; referred to, 102, 130; 

theory of interest, 156. 
Disease: period of greatest immunity from, 187. 
Donaldson: on growth of brain, 177. 
Drawings: character of, at various ages, 190. 

Educational psychology : relation of, to social psychology, 
236 f. 



INDEX 261 

Educational value of child-psychology, 234 f. 

Emotion : adult emotions not to be read back into children, 
11; relation of, to activity, 43; necessity of a func- 
tional definition of, 43, 48 ; relation of, to habit and 
instinct, 44 f. ; early expression of, 50 ; fallacies likely 
to be incurred in the interpretation of children's emo- 
tions, 53 ; first emotions few and closely related to 
primary organic needs, 53, 55 ; primarily the "feel" of 
physical adjustments, 54 ; absence of meaning in chil- 
dren's feelings, 54 ; fear, 56 f. ; illustrations of capri- 
ciousness of infantile emotion, 60 f. ; astonishment, its 
relation to facility in making reactions, 64 ; sympathy, 
65 ; emotion and functional point of view, 69 ; place of 
emotion in the act, 93 ; later development of emotional 
life, 152, 

Environment: influence of, on interests, 163 f. 

Evolution theory : influence of, on recapitulation theory, 
158. 

Experience of child: undifferentiated, 10, 18, 19; relation 
of, to physical development, 11; a unity, 11; its ele- 
ments to be interpreted with reference to entire process 
of experience, 16; its initial problems, 20; its validity, 
214 f. 

Experiment: essentials of a good, 218. 
Experimental methods in child-study, 117 f. 

Fatigue period, 188. 

Fear, 56 f. ; not necessarily inherited, 58 ; fear of animals 
accounted for, 162. 

Frear : on class punishment, 185; on susceptibility to sug- 
gestion, 197. 

Functional standpoint : the logical one for teacher, 243. 

Games: from three to six, 178; imitative games, 179, 182; 

running games, 182 ; importance of, in second period, 

188; co-operative games, 192, 201 f. 
Generalizations in child-study, 211, 224. 
Growth, unequal, 176 f. 
Gulick: on games of children, 178, 182. 

Habit : relation of, to emotion, 44, 45. 

Hall, Dr. G. S. : "The Story of a Sand-Pile," 191, 204. 

Hancock: on mental tests, 194, 204. 



262 INDEX 

Harmonious-development theory of education, 241. 
Herbart : formal steps in acquisition of knowledge, 338. 
Heredity; influence of, on interests, 164. 

Idea : defined in terms of the act, 93. 

Ideals at various ages, 119. 

Image: differentiation of, 92; development of, 100 f. 

Imagery: relation of, to play, 173; relation of, to reality, 
174; relation of, to attention, 177; in pre-adolescent 
period, 189. 

Imitation, 116 f.; a social rather than a psychological cate- 
gory, 117, 122, 124; Professor Baldwin's theory of, 
117 f . ; Dr. G. F. Stout's theory of, 121 note; a minor 
term in functional psychology, 122; imitation not a 
copying, but a defining of experience, 120, 121, 123 ; 
a spiral rather than a circular process, 126 f . ; persistent 
imitation, 128; relation of, to suggestion, 128; relation 
of, to interests, 174; imitative games, 179. 

Impulses : the basis for the development of consciousness, 
73 ; development of impulses, 75. 

Impulsive movements: nature of, 21, 23; stimuli to, 23, 24; 
relation of, to later activity, 26. 

Individuality: relation of, to environment and heredity, 166. 

Inhibition: Preyer's theory of, no f . ; the functional theory 
of, III f . ; relation of, to volition, 113. 

Instincts : illustrations of, 22 ; distinguished from reflexes, 
22 ; connection with emotion, 44, 52. 

Interests: necessity of a comparative study of, 154; psycho- 
logical aspects of, 155; origin of, relation to growth, 
156; relation of, to environment, 163 f . ; relation of, to 
heredity, 164; interest and "control," 166; classification 
of, 168 f . ; relation of imitation to, 174; first interests 
center in vital processes, 172; and later in mere activity, 
173 ; interest in skill and technique, 181 ; the interests 
of the second period of childhood, 181 ; interest in 
objects, 184; in drawing, 190; in vocations, 179, 186, 
189, 197 f . ; the constructive interest, 191; pre-adolescent 
interests, 192; interest in the Bible, 195; relation of, to 
breadth of personality, 196, 200 f. ; studies in interests 
of Binet, Barnes, and Shaw, 209; forward reference of, 
213. 



INDEX 263 

James, William : theory of emotion, 225. 
Judgment, 103. 

Kline: the running-away instinct, 178, 183, 185. 

LiNDLEY : the puzzle interest, 180, 195. 
LuKENS : children's drawings, 190. 

McGhee : on games, 188, 203, 206. 

McMuRRY : on Herbart's theory of formal steps, 238. 

Memory: place of, in the act, 102. 

Mental functions : not at first present as such, 84 f. ; 
defined with reference to their place in overt activity, 
25, 89 ; time of appearance of, indeterminate, 89 ; error 
of treating in isolation, 246 f. 

Methods of child-study: criticism of, 216 f . ; relative 
value of, 219. 

Moral ideas of children: 132 f . ; morality defined, 132; 
theories of childhood morality, 133 f. ; morality correl- 
ative with organization of experience, 134 f., 144 f . ; 
attitude of children toward truth, 141 f. ; attitude of 
children toward deception, 143; childish cruelty, 150; 
periods of childhood morality, 149. 

Mother : development of baby's idea of, 79 f. 

Myth interest, 173. 

Objects of child's world, 37, 78 f. ; vary with organization 
of experience, 78 ; at first stand for overt activities, 81. 

Observation of children : kind of, necessary, 20, 90, 91. 

Old Testament : interest in, 194 f. 

O'Shea : on aesthetic sense of children, 152; study in chil- 
dren's interests, 209. 

Pedagogical bearings of genetic psychology, 243 f. 
Periods of childhood, 172, 181. 
Persistence: problem of, 128 f. 

Play: in first periods of childhood, 174; relation of, to 
imagery, 173, 175; in second period of childhood, 187. 
Practical attitudes of children, 205 f., 207. 
Practical sense : appearance of, 200. 
Pre-adolescent characteristics, 192 f. 



264 INDEX 

Preyer: classification of movements, 21; theory of separate 
consciousnesses, 33 ; development of self-consciousness, 
38 f. ; quoted on early emotions, 47 ; referred to, 50 ; on 
fear in infants, 56 f. ; on astonishment in infants, 64 ; on 
sympathy in infants, 65; theory of volition, 105; theory 
of inhibition, no f. 

Psychology : functional, 4, 8 ; faculty, 2 ; theories of faculty- 
psychology, 3, 4 ; why disappointing to teachers, 13 ; 
child-psychology, its justification, 10, ii; aims of, 12; 
value of, for teacher, 13 ; problems of, 14. 

Punishment: attitude toward, 185 f. 

Puzzle-interest, 180. 

Questioning age, 173. 

Reasoning, 103, 187. 

Reflex : defined, 25 f. ; relation to voluntary act and to 

impulses, 26 f , ; inhibition of reflexes, no. 
Religion : tendencies to, in adolescence, 226. 
Reminiscences : value of, 220, 224. 
Running-away periods, 178, 183, 185. 

Sensation : erroneous theories of character of first sensa- 
tions, 18 ; at first undifferentiated, 34, 35. 

Serial development of faculties: criticised, 16, 18, 30. 

Sex-differences of children : as to games, 182, 203 f. ; 
as to aspirations, 186 f . ; in ideals, 193, 197, 199 f., 204; 
as to superstitions, 205 ; sense of the practical, 205 ; 
emotional differences, 205 ; as to moral ideals, 207. 

Sheldon : social organizations of boys, 192, 194. 

Shinn, M. W. : quoted on development of grasping co- 
ordination, 85 f. ; on development of the hand-eye co- 
ordination, 93 f. 

Siegert : on fatigue, 183. 

Skill: interest in, 181. 

Social consciousness: theories regarding its origin, 116; 
a phase of all consciousness, 116, 117, 131. 

Spencer, Herbert : on use of term "reflex," 25. 

Spontaneous: (see Impulsive). 

Starbuck, E. D. : on adolescent conversions, 228 f. 

Storm-and-stress period : causes of, 225 f. 



INDEX 265 

Stout, Dr. G. F. : theory of imitation, 121 note. 

Suggestion : pre-adolescent susceptibility to, 227. 

Sully, 173 note. 

Superstitions of children, 205. 

Sympathy, 65. 

Taylor: on children's hopes, 179. 

Teleology of interests, 213. 

Tracy, 13, 17, 113, 125. 

Truth : attitude of children toward, 141 f. 

Variation from norm on physical side, 212 f. 

Vision : early use of, 87. 

Vocational interest: (see Aspirations). 

Volition : defined in terms of the act, 93 ; relation of, to 
image, 97; development of voluntary action, loi ; rela- 
tivity of volition, 104 f . ; criticism of Preyer's theory of, 
105 f . ; place of, in a functional psychology, 106 f. 

Vostrovsky : on children's superstitions, 205. 

Willard : on children's ambitions, 187. 



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